Futility Closet - 302-The Galápagos Affair

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to the Futility Closet podcast, forgotten stories from the pages of history. Visit us online to sample more than 11,000 quirky curiosities from writerless writing to a paradox of taste. This is episode 302. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. In 1929, a German couple fled civilization to live on an uninhabited island in the East Pacific. But other settlers soon followed, leading to strife, suspicion, and possibly murder.

Starting point is 00:00:43 In today's show, we'll tell the story of the Galapagos Affair, a bizarre mystery that remains unsolved. We'll also meet another deadly doctor and puzzle over a posthumous marriage. Ever since she'd been a girl, Dora Strauch had felt called to some higher purpose, though she didn't know what it might be. She was undergoing treatment for multiple sclerosis when she discovered a similar feeling in her doctor, Friedrich Ritter. He was 15 years her senior, but they felt they had some shared destiny. She wrote, we had a feeling that we were intended for each other and that there was some work we had to do together, as though we were a joint tool in the hand of a spirit using us to unknown ends. He wanted to take up a life of contemplation to

Starting point is 00:01:24 perfect himself spiritually, and he felt that couldn't be done in a crowded civilization. Together, they decided to move permanently to a remote spot where they could be alone, break the bonds of conventional existence, and discover a new way to live. Inspired by the writings of an American naturalist, they decided on Floriana, an island in the Galapagos group off the coast of Ecuador. In 1909, the Scottish traveler Alexander Mann had written that it would be an ideal Robinson Crusoe retreat for people tired of the artificiality of modern civilization. So in 1929, they set out to live as a modern Adam and Eve on an island of 67 square miles in the East Pacific.

Starting point is 00:02:03 They were gigantically idealistic. They planned to live without fire, and they brought no guns because, Strauch wrote, to do so would be to deny our principle of peace toward all things. Though he was a doctor, Ritter refused to bring morphia. He said they would learn to overcome pain by the power of will. But, Strauch wrote, no shadow of doubt obscured my certainty that I had at last started upon the task for which But, Stra of continuous, often back-breaking work. But they had occasional help as other people visited the island. In October, three Norwegians came over from a neighboring island to hunt cattle, and eventually they contributed lumber and corrugated iron so that Friedrich could begin to build a proper house. Their garden flourished, watered by the spring, and the island gave them oranges, lemons, avocados, guavas, and papayas.

Starting point is 00:03:06 the spring, and the island gave them oranges, lemons, avocados, guavas, and papayas. With time, thanks to their endless toil, the homestead became a true home, a roomy house without walls next to the spring, and they cleared a strip of jungle at the end of the garden so they could watch the sun set into the ever-changing ocean. As word of their experiment got out, stories began to appear in newspapers around the world, and dozens of letters began to arrive from people who envisioned Floriana as a kind of carefree Tahiti. One morning in September 1932, a schooner arrived and began to unload supplies. It was a German couple, Heinz and Margaret Wittmer, who had been inspired by the newspaper accounts. They had brought a 13-year-old son, and as it turned out, Margaret was pregnant. They had chosen Floriana in part because they knew that Ritta was a physician and could help with the new baby. Strauch and Ritta thought that was

Starting point is 00:03:49 a bit presumptuous, but for the time being, the Wittmers didn't trouble them. They set up a homestead of their own three miles away, and Strauch and Ritta gave them seeds and advice and lent them their burro. Their things stood until November, when a new arrival turned the island upside down and set it on the path toward tragedy. A woman who called herself the Baroness Elwaz Wagner-Bousquet arrived with two young men. Almost immediately, she offended and annoyed everyone on the island. She arrived at Frito riding a donkey and wearing sunglasses and a jaunty beret, took a seat, and presented her hand for Strauch to kiss. Strauch only shook it, and the two were immediately enemies. The baroness had brought a parcel of mail from the mainland,

Starting point is 00:04:28 and they found it had been opened and read. She told them she'd come from an illustrious Austrian family and was French by marriage. Not even her own followers believed that she was really a baroness, but no one would challenge her about it, and with sharp looks she forbade them to discuss it. Strauch found her trivial, theatrical, and frivolous, but also menacing and sinister,

Starting point is 00:04:47 as if she were bringing an air of doom to the island, where she and Ritta had now been living for three years. Without permission, this new group set up camp on the Wittmers' claim, pitching a tent next to their spring. Formerly, no one owned land on Floriana, but until now it had been understood that the spot where one settled and cleared the jungle was one's own. The Baroness declared that she owned the island and everything on it, and that she was going to build a big hotel and make it into a resort for millionaires. She had consulted

Starting point is 00:05:14 no one about this plan, which did not appear to be legal, but it also wasn't clear that she had the resources or the discipline to see it through. Still, Strach felt that it cast a blight on the whole project she'd built with Ritta, as though the tedious civilization they had fled was now following them to the island. I'm going to pause here to say that it's terribly hard to understand the actual facts. Dora Strauch and Margaret Wittmer both wrote books about their time on the island, but they contradict each other and there's a great deal that we just don't know. I'm doing my best. That's often a problem with these stories, right? Finding a really authoritative, reliable source that you know is accurate and unbiased.

Starting point is 00:05:50 When I started this, I thought, it's like seven people on a desert island. How complicated could it be? And it's just a symphony of complexity and there's just incidents left and right and you can't really tell. What actually happened. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:06:02 Which is interesting, but also frustrating. At the center of the struggle was the Baroness, who everyone agrees was vain, envious, mistrustful, and exhaustingly addicted to drama. Strauch seems to have hated her immediately, which makes it hard to trust her account. The two young men, Rudolf Lorenz and Robert Philipson, were both her lovers. Lorenz said that the Baroness had invented herself at the movies and carried these adopted personas into nightclubs, where she took a different escort every night. Her husband had eventually separated from her. When Lawrence had joined her, she'd wrecked his business, making a mess of the accounting. Then she'd read about Frito and hatched her plan to

Starting point is 00:06:38 build a hotel there. Lawrence had had to go along because now he depended on her financially. Margaret Wittmer had her baby in early 1933. That brought some temporary goodwill to the island, but that foundered quickly in the face of the Baroness's bizarre, erratic, and allegedly malicious behavior. She told Strauch that she shot dogs in order to injure them and brought them back to her homestead to nurse them back to health. She asked Ritta, seemingly in passing, whether milk was an antidote to arsenic poisoning. The Wittmers heard repeated violent quarrels at the Baroness's

Starting point is 00:07:10 homestead, but their cause was never clear. The two young men, Lorenz and Philipson, seemed to hate one another, not just as rivals in love, but, Strauch said, each seeing in the other the picture of his own debasement, compelled to live together. And allegedly, the Baroness intercepted shipments of rice and condensed milk that had been intended for the other settlers, then pretended it was her own and offered to sell it to them. The list goes on and on. The trouble is that the accounts are contradictory and second-hand, and strangely all the evil takes place off-stage. One day, Heinz Wittmer discovered that his boat had gone missing from the beach, and everyone decided that the Baroness had destroyed it or given it away. Well, maybe she did, but the evidence is purely circumstantial. And it seems for someone who's so chaotic,

Starting point is 00:07:55 for her to have done everything she's accused of doing, she'd have to be just amazingly well organized and have plenty of free time for somebody who's trying to stay alive on a desert island, you know? Strauch and Ritta found it hard enough just to keep body and soul together for the first few months, at least, while they were getting organized there. I don't think—it's not clear to me how she could possibly have had time to do everything that she's accused of having done. But I guess once she gets a reputation for causing trouble, then anything goes wrong, and it's easy to say, well, the duchess must have done it. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:08:25 And someone did these things. A baroness, sorry. Called her a duchess. Yeah. May as well. Somebody did, a lot of things, there's some depredation definitely happened, and there's only just a handful of suspects. So I don't know what to say.

Starting point is 00:08:40 It just, it's interesting to read about, but I can't. You keep, as you're reading it, you keep wanting to come to some conclusion and find an answer, and I don't have one. Ritta didn't take the Baroness seriously. He thought she loved drama and would be gone in a year. But both he and Wittmer wrote to the authorities on the mainland, telling them about this chaos and asking them to intervene. In May, the Ecuadorian government sent a man out to talk to her,

Starting point is 00:09:02 but she could be very charming when she wanted to, and she convinced him that she was only a lonely woman, that things were better now, and that it would be best to leave her alone. She was so convincing that he gave her secure tenure to 20 hectares of land, as well as clear rights to the spring near the Wittmers' homestead. If things had continued in this vein, life on the island would have been difficult and unpleasant, but now they get seriously dangerous and crazy. One night, a visiting journalist came to summon Ritta for medical help. A friend of his had been shot. It turned out that the Baroness had gone out with a hunting party that included the journalist and a handsome friend of his named Joseph. The Baroness had been

Starting point is 00:09:39 trying to engage Joseph's interest throughout the afternoon without success. As the group were hunting cattle, the Baroness had fired and had hit her hired man, Ahrens, in the stomach. But the evidence seemed to show that she'd really been aiming for Joseph. Strauch believed that she'd hoped to wound Joseph in the leg so that she could nurse him back to health. At the last minute, Ahrens had moved unexpectedly and been hit instead. The stories get increasingly strange and outrageous, and I'm having to simplify them here. It's hard to believe that seven people could generate such a tornado of drama. Strauch's burrow disappeared one day. The Baroness mentioned using it for some work,

Starting point is 00:10:15 and it came back to Frieda with signs of grievous mistreatment. Then it disappeared for good. It turned out that the Baroness had contrived to have it invade Wittmer's garden one night, and he'd shot it. Lorenz told Strauch he was desperate to get off the island, but when he'd tried to collect his things from the Baroness's homestead, she and Philipson had knocked him unconscious, flogged him, and dragged him outside. He'd wandered the island for two days before he managed to find Frito. If this crazy story has a climax, it comes here.

Starting point is 00:10:44 At noon on March 19th, Strauch and Ritta heard a long, drawn-out shriek. Strauch wrote, It was an outcry of such panic terror that it was hardly human, and yet it was a woman's voice. Even this detail is baffling. She wrote that it sounded neither near nor far, but it cannot have come from the other homesteads because they were three miles away. They waited for someone to come to them seeking medical help, but no one did. Two days later, Lawrence appeared and told them rather mildly that he'd told off the

Starting point is 00:11:11 Baroness once and for all and that he was staying with the Wittmers. If that seems like a suspiciously tidy resolution, an even bigger one was coming. On a later visit, Lawrence and Margaret Wittmer announced that some friends of the Baroness had visited the island and that she had decided to take all her plans for the Floriana Hotel and transfer them to the South Seas, where she thought they'd have more success. Then she and Robert Philipson had left forever. This seemed so gigantically unlikely that Ritta told Strauch that he thought it was a lie. He thought that Lawrence had finally murdered both the Baroness and Philipson and that the Wittmers were covering for him.

Starting point is 00:11:46 Strauch found some support for this. Lawrence had said that the Baroness had left her homestead in disorder, and that she'd taken all the suitcases, including his own. But when Strauch visited, she found it tidy, and all the suitcases were there. Also, the Baroness had a particular copy of the picture of Dorian Gray that she took with her everywhere, and that was still in the homestead. Lawrence still wanted to leave the island himself, but he was short of money and asked Strauch and Ritta whether they'd like to buy any of the Baroness's belongings. When Strauch asked

Starting point is 00:12:14 suppose she were to come back, Lawrence said, don't worry, there's no danger of that, not anymore. No trace of the Baroness or of Robert Philipson has ever been found. That's the enduring mystery at the center of all this chaos. I'll run through the possibilities, but I'll say at the start that there's no way to prove any of them. The whole thing is like a bad mystery novel in which everyone has a motive and there's no conclusive evidence. The first and simplest possibility is that a yacht really did show up and Philipson and the Baroness decided spontaneously to leave the island forever. The trouble there is that no yacht was seen that day, either at Floriana or anywhere in the archipelago, and despite the media sensation that followed all this drama, the missing pair never

Starting point is 00:12:53 turned up anywhere else. Perhaps a yacht picked them up and then sank. Here again, no yacht was seen that day, none was reported in Galapagos waters, and none was reported lost. In either of those cases, it seems unlikely that the Baroness would have left Floriana without her luggage and without a book that she claimed to take everywhere. If the two weren't picked up by a yacht, then they must have died on the island. It seems impossible that they just walked into the interior for no reason and somehow stayed alive there indefinitely without contacting the outside world. If they died, the possibilities are

Starting point is 00:13:25 accident, suicide, and murder. Certainly many accidents are possible on a volcanic island, and conceivably the Baroness might have decided to end her life when her dreams of building a hotel began to fade. But then why would Margaret Wittmer and Rudolf Lorenz invent the story of the yacht? If she was murdered, then the most likely suspect is Rudolf Lorenz. All the other settlers found the baroness exasperating, but she'd ruined Lorenz financially and had been hindering his attempts to leave the island. He could have killed the two victims in any number of ways and disposed of the bodies on the island or in the sea, perhaps with an accomplice, but this has never been proven.

Starting point is 00:14:00 This cursed story brings two more strange deaths. Rudolf Lorenz, who had been longing for months to get off the island, finally did catch a boat, but dangerous currents swept it onto the most arid island of the archipelago, and he and the captain both died there of hunger and thirst. And Friedrich Ritter died on November 21st, 1934, apparently of botulism after eating bad chicken. Even this involves a dark mystery. Dürer-Strauch says only that he died, but Margaret Wittmer says that at the end, unable to speak, he felt for a pencil and wrote to Strauch, I curse you with my dying breath. It's not clear why he would have

Starting point is 00:14:37 done so or whether this even happened. Dürer-Strauch went back to Germany. She'd spent five years altogether on the island and was the only surviving person who'd seen the whole story unfold. That left the Wittmers to face the official government inquiry, which cleared them of any wrongdoing. They remained on the island and set up a hotel that's still run by their descendants. Dura Strauch published what she called a survivor's account of the Galapagos affair in 1936. It was her belief that Rudolf Lawrence had killed the Baroness and Robert Philipson. Margaret Wittmer published her own book in 1961. She maintained that those two had gone to Tahiti. There's no objective account of any of this,

Starting point is 00:15:15 no way to prove any theory, and if my reading is right, even at the time, no one on the island claimed to have all the answers. Each regarded the others as enigmatic and suspicious. So even if you had a time machine and infinite patience, it might take a very long while to work out everything that happened on Floriana Island in 1934. Futility Closet is supported entirely by our incredible listeners. We want to thank everyone who helps us to be able to keep making the show, and this week we're sending out a special thank you to Craig Murphy, our newest super patron. If you want to join Craig and all our other wonderful patrons who enable our continuing celebration of the quirky and the curious, please go to patreon.com slash futilitycloset or see the supporter section of the website. I also want

Starting point is 00:16:10 to thank everyone who sent in donations to the show, which are also really appreciated. So thank you so much to everyone who helps keep Futility Closet going. We really couldn't do this without you. this without you. In episodes 282 and 285, we discussed stories of British tourists being gassed into unconsciousness in their caravans or campers in Europe. And I had mentioned that the British Royal College of Anesthetists had issued a statement saying that they really didn't find these stories to be very plausible. Will Denahan sent us an informed follow-up on this topic. Dear Greg and Sharon, although I'm always excited to hear the latest episode regardless of the topic matter, as an anesthetist, I have greatly enjoyed the more medical theme to some of the episodes

Starting point is 00:16:59 and follow-up in recent times, although sadly all of the stories are rather nefarious. Knowing the effort it takes to induce and maintain anesthesia as part of everyday practice, i.e. delivering the volatile anesthetic gas directly into the lungs via an endotracheal tube, I agree with the Royal College of Anesthetists that the idea of criminals using a similar mechanism to rob camper vans seems far-fetched. The sheer machinery and cost alone would be totally counterproductive. The follow-up about the Moscow theater hostage crisis in episode 293 was slightly more troubling. Opioids, such as the fentanyl the Russians reported using, are virtually never used via an inhalational route in UK practice. Given intravenously, they can cause

Starting point is 00:17:41 respiratory arrest and overdose, and I suspect that a similar process was the cause of the hostage deaths from the gas the Russians pumped in. That the Russian doctors weren't told which agent had been used, preventing timely antidote administration, surely compounded things for the poor theatergoers. So, interesting to hear from an actual anesthetist on the topic. A very informed opinion there. Yes. anesthetist on the topic. A very informed opinion there. Yes. Will also included a follow-up to the story of the English doctor who was accused in 1957 of killing some of his patients for their money. In relation to the story of John Bodkin Adams from episode 294, there exists a question

Starting point is 00:18:20 on the UK cremation forms that reads, have you, so far as you are aware, any pecuniary interest in the death of the deceased? I'm sure the question is asking whether you are in line to profit from the death of the patient, e.g. via their will or estate or some such. However, doctors are paid a supplement for completing these forms as more rigorous checks are required to ensure cremation is appropriate. As such, there is a small pecuniary interest in filling the form out, albeit perhaps not in the way the question means. cremation is appropriate. As such, there is a small pecuniary interest in filling the form out, albeit perhaps not in the way the question means. So yeah, it does seem like technically every doctor would have to say that yes, they do have some financial interest since they are being paid

Starting point is 00:18:56 a small amount to fill out the form, which is a bit amusing and probably not what was intended when the questions were written. They should just check that box for you. Yeah, right. what was intended when the questions were written. They should just check that box for you. Yeah, right. And Will helpfully included a link to a page that explains the relatively new procedure in place now in the UK for when someone is to be cremated. There are detailed forms that have to be filled out prior to a cremation by two different doctors, the doctor who had been treating the patient and a second doctor who is supposed

Starting point is 00:19:22 to confirm the information provided by the first. Cremation could destroy evidence if a doctor is attempting to hide malpractice or deliberate harm to a patient, and this new system was implemented to make it harder for a rogue doctor to abuse their position. As I was reading the explanation of this, I was thinking about John Bodkin Adams, but the page actually mentioned another doctor, Harold Shipman, as being part of the reason for this current system. And another of our listeners, Tim Lawrence, had also mentioned Harold Shipman to us in connection to the story on Adams. So Shipman was a British medical doctor who was arrested in 1998 for killing a number of his patients. He was convicted of 15 such murders

Starting point is 00:20:01 in 2000, but an official government inquiry found that he had killed at least 215 and as many as 260 of his patients by injecting them with lethal doses of painkillers, making him the most prolific known serial killer. It's not known what Shipman's motives were for killing so many of his patients, and he hanged himself in his prison cell in 2004 where he was serving a life sentence, so we'll likely never know. It doesn't appear that he stood to gain financially from most of the deaths, but in the case of his last victim, he did forge a will in his favor, and that led to his finally being caught.

Starting point is 00:20:36 In 1998, Angela Woodruff's 81-year-old mother was found dead in her home in Hyde a few hours after being seen there by Shipman. Woodruff was a lawyer and handled her mother's affairs, so she was rather surprised to learn of a will that she'd never seen, which left most of her mother's estate to Dr. Shipman. Apparently, Shipman had actually typed the will himself on an old typewriter owned by the victim, and the forged will read, I give all my estate, money, and house to my doctor. My family are not in need, and I want to reward him for all the care he has given me and the people of Hyde. An obituary on Shipman in the

Starting point is 00:21:11 BMJ said, this was an absurdly clumsy forgery with an obviously forged signature. It's hard not to believe that he wanted, at least unconsciously, to be caught, or perhaps he thought that he was invincible. In any case, Woodruff was convinced that the will was forged and alerted the local police. Her mother's body was exhumed and a post-mortem showed that she had died of a morphine overdose that would have been administered in the time frame of Shipman's visit with her. These findings prompted an investigation into more of his patients' deaths, though Shipman had persuaded many of his patients' families to cremate their relatives, which led the police to try to focus on a smaller number of deaths that

Starting point is 00:21:49 they thought they could make the best case for, those who hadn't been cremated and who had died soon after a visit from Shipman. Shipman's BMJ obituary says, Few doctors have had as great an impact on British medicine as Harold Shipman. When he and his colleagues qualified from Leeds Medical School in 1970, none of them would ever have imagined that his obituary in the BMJ would have opened with such a sentence. But his impact and his legacy is incalculable. Few lives can have raised so many questions about how we practice and regulate medicine. That's really hard to understand because you'd think anyone goes into medicine, hopefully, because they want to help people. And this is the very opposite of that. It's just

Starting point is 00:22:28 strange that he would, you know, wind up having a career like that, just killing so many people. Yeah. And I mean, there's been lots of speculation about a variety of reasons, but I suppose without understanding his full psychology, it would be hard to know. I mean, it's hard even to see what his motive can have been. It sounds like he didn't profit much financially. Right. And again, I guess we would have to know his underlying psychology for whether he enjoyed the power of it or whether he thought he was doing something. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:22:57 And as you say, I guess we'll never know. Apparently at his trial, he was like really arrogant and came off as not a particularly nice or compassionate guy. So I don't know. That's interesting. Will also asked if we could maybe give a shout out to Andy the Czar Rogers, who he says was the first person who showed me your fantastic podcast.

Starting point is 00:23:21 So hey, Andy, thanks for listening and for recommending the show to Will. And we recently received a really touching email from a listener named Riley. Hi, Sharon and Greg. Congrats on 300 wonderful episodes. I hope you've enjoyed making them as much as I have enjoyed listening. On a more personal note, I wanted to thank you. Aside from giving me unusual facts and stories to recite and introducing me to another favorite podcast in No Such Thing as a Fish, this week I discovered a much more significant and unexpected impact you've had in my life. My father-in-law had a major stroke a couple weeks ago. COVID prevents us from visiting him, but he has recently started using an iPad for video calls.

Starting point is 00:24:02 Unfortunately, the stroke left him largely unable to speak, and he is limited to thumbs up slash down to indicate yes or no for now. On a recent call, we realized he wanted our help with something, and that's when my futility closet lateral thinking puzzle training kicked in. At first, we were falling into the usual traps like multi-part or negative questions that lead to ambiguous answers. Then we realized some of our questions were irrelevant to the problem and started using tricks like, would it help us to know X? Or following up his answers with, is that important? It's not perfect, and I dearly wish I had Sharon's ability to jump straight to the answer,

Starting point is 00:24:36 but we made better progress than anyone else had before, and that was a huge win. So thank you most sincerely for this incredible podcast of fun esoterica and the unexpected life skill you have taught me by example. Some of our listeners have mentioned in the past that lateral thinking puzzles can help train you to be better at things like problem solving and not jumping to conclusions, but this really represents a great use of the puzzle solving skills that we'd never thought of before. When I asked if it was okay to read this email on the show, Riley said that it was, and said, who knows, maybe it will help someone else trying to communicate in the future, which is a really nice thought. I'd never thought

Starting point is 00:25:14 about that before. It's such an odd skill, an odd task, but I can see it would have real value in certain situations. Yeah. And Riley also enclosed a photo of a kitty stretched way up, demonstrating that lever-style door handles are not just for bears, reviving an older topic on this show about how bears, and sometimes kitties, find lever-style handles helpful for opening doors. And I'm still impressed that any cat learns to do that, especially as they can usually barely reach the handles. So that means if your door handle starts jiggling, that means you threw a cat or a bear on the other side. Thanks so much to everyone who writes to us. We really appreciate your comments, follow-ups, and feedback. So if you have any of those to send to us, please send it to podcast

Starting point is 00:26:02 at futilitycloset.com. It's my turn to try to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. Greg is going to give me an odd sounding situation and I have to see if I can figure out what is going on asking yes or no questions. This is from listener Alon Aitan. It's possible for a person to have a marriage certificate that's dated after his death certificate. How? Well, the marriage certificate isn't for him. It's for somebody else. I don't know. Or it's the death certificate isn't for the person. You get full points for that. It fits how you worded it i think um okay so we're assuming this is this person has a marriage certificate and a death certificate pertaining to themselves yes ah i should have said well okay um so you're implying that somebody got married after they died

Starting point is 00:27:01 is what you're implying but but apparently they did not that's not a question okay um all right um it's you say it's possible has this happened are we talking about a specific example or just a quirky way that it could happen uh i don't know i'm just talking about a specific example or just a quirky way that it could happen? I don't know. I'm just talking about a quirky way. Okay. It could have happened. And does it matter where or when?

Starting point is 00:27:33 Because laws vary about both marriage and death, I suppose. I'm going to say yes to where. Yes to where. And by the where, does that mean the country or a different kind of where? Yes. Okay. to where and by the where does that mean the country or a different kind of where uh yes okay so this is laws that would apply in a certain country you're sounding very unsure no no i'm being careful oh no all right um i'm confused so does this hinge on like different definitions of death? No, no, it doesn't. A death certificate, a marriage certificate dated after the person's death certificate.

Starting point is 00:28:16 Does this hinge on different calendar customs or dating customs? No. How you date things. Are we talking about human beings? As opposed to sheep? Yes, we're talking about human beings. Married sheep who got married after they died. I don't know.

Starting point is 00:28:37 And you said it might depend on where. And when I asked, does it depend on what country, you sort of said yes. No. I think I may of said yes. No. I think I may have said yes. Let's say no. I'm trying to confuse things as little as possible. Okay, okay.

Starting point is 00:28:53 Does this matter, the person's occupation? Like there are certain rules that apply in the military or something. No. No. Shoot, I came up with all kinds of scenarios for that too. The occupation doesn't matter. Does this involve the person being involved in some sort of, I want to say like an institution, like they're in jail or they're in a hospital?

Starting point is 00:29:16 No. Okay. And you said the where actually doesn't matter what country they're in. That's correct. But there is a where that is important. Yes. Yes. Yes. They're on an airplane crossing international date lines?

Starting point is 00:29:32 Yes. Seriously? That was like a wild guess. If you get married in Japan, then fly to Hawaii and immediately die. And immediately die. Your marriage certificate will be dated after your death certificate. Oh. Oh. So for all I know, after your death certificate. Oh. Oh.

Starting point is 00:29:47 So for all I know, that's actually happened. Well, I suppose it could, like if you get married in Japan and fly to Hawaii for your honeymoon and something goes horribly wrong, that would be very sad. Thanks a lot. Thank you. And if anybody else has a puzzle they'd like to send in for us to try, you can send that to podcast at futilitycloset.com.

Starting point is 00:30:06 Futility Closet is a full-time commitment for us. If you'd like to help support our show, you can find a donate button in the support a section of the website at futilitycloset.com. Or you can join our Patreon campaign, where you'll get extra discussions on some of the stories, more lateral thinking puzzles, outtakes, and peeks behind the scenes of the show. You can find our Patreon page at patreon.com slash futilitycloset or see our website for the link. At our website, you'll also find over 11,000 entertaining esoterica, the Futility Closet store, information about the Futility Closet books, and the show notes for the podcast with links and references for the topics we've covered. If you have any questions or comments, you can email us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. Our music was written and performed

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Futility Closet - 302-The Galápagos Affair

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