Heart Starts Pounding: Horrors, Hauntings, and Mysteries - 40: The Devil's Bible and Other Haunting Tales for Halloween

Episode Date: October 26, 2023

In honor of Halloween, I'm sharing some of the most chilling tales I've heard this year Subscribe on Patreon for bonus content and to become a member of our Rogue Detecting Society. Patrons have access to ad-free listening and bonus content. Follow on Tik Tok and Instagram for a daily dose of horror. We have a monthly newsletter now! Be sure to sign up for updates and more. This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Check out BetterHelp.com/staycurious for 10% off your first month Heart Starts Pounding is written and produced by Kaelyn Moore. 

You begged for more. So now, Blink 182 are coming again one more time. Live at Roger Center August 15th with special guests Alexis on fire and Pierce the Veil. Get tickets this Friday at 10am at ticketmaster.ca, Blink 182, the brand new album One More Time is available everywhere now. Visit Blink182.com Welcome to Heart Starts Pounding, a podcast of horrors, hauntings and mysteries. I'm your host, Kaelin Moore. This is a community for those with a dark curiosity. Those of us that like to indulge in things that are spooky and sometimes a little macabre.

This week in particular, the week of Halloween, tends to be a time where I indulge the most. I spend a lot of time thinking about why things are scary and why some things are terrifying to us, but we choose to learn about them anyways. People sometimes ask me how I can sleep at night with all of the dark stuff that I consume, and to that I would say, I think you actually might be surprised at what makes me squirm. I can pretty easily read about the illegal selling of human remains at Harvard. I'll walk into a building that people say is haunted.

The other day, I even let two Scientologists pitch me on classes for 20 minutes because while those things all do freak me out, my curiosity about them trumps my fear and I have to learn more. But on the flip side, I couldn't watch the first episode of Domer. You know the show on Netflix, the one about Jeffrey Domer

that like 90 million people watched. I'm so clearly in the minority, but I got so scared watching the first episode I couldn't keep going. I think for some people though, Dahmer scratched that same itch. It's so scary to think about, it's awful, and obviously his crimes are unforgivable, but our curiosity about things like the darkness that lies within people wins out, and we're just pulled towards them.

At least for me, it's like a gravitational pull that I can't escape from. Anyways, I could write an entire book about all this, but that's all to say that this week in particular, I spend a lot of time thinking about why I find things scary. And why even when I do find them scary, I'm so drawn to them. Today, what I want to share with you

are a few stories I found myself really drawn to this year. They're all supernatural, and I couldn't find an exactly perfect episode to fit them into, but I could not stop thinking about these stories for weeks after I read them. I think some of you will find these ghost tales quite cozy for Halloween, honestly, but others, like me, might get a legitimate chill.

Our first story is one of the oldest written ghost stories. Our second is about what is perhaps considered the most cursed book in existence, and our last is a creepy tale about letting go. And as always, listener discretion is advised. I'm often scared of ancient ghost stories, the ones that happened in a distant past, in a world that feels like it no longer exists.

It's scary to me to think that back then, they experienced something that's been lost to time. A lot of those stories died with the people who told them, and much of the writing from thousands of years ago has been destroyed. However, when it comes to ancient Rome, some of the writings still exist, like the letters that Pliny the Younger wrote. Pliny was a lawyer among other things in ancient Rome around the years 60 to 100 AD, and he wrote hundreds of letters in his lifetime, of which around 247 still exist today. Most of Pliny's writing talks about life in ancient Rome, like

who was in charge, what he thought about them. One time he even described the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in great detail, which had just happened 25 years prior. And while Pliny's letters are of great historical importance to us now. Historians were surprised upon reading one letter which described something very peculiar, something supernatural that had happened. Pliny had written a letter to a senator, Lucius Licinius Sura, in a somewhat panicked tone. In the letter, he had written the senator to tell him about a haunted house in Athens. He starts the letter by asking the senator if he believes in ghosts,

because Pliny had just heard a ghost story that was so chilling, even this hard-pressed lawyer was inclined to believe it. This is that story. In Athens, there was a large, roomy house that had such a bad reputation no one would move into it. It was well known that in the dead of night, the sound of clanking chains could be heard throughout the house.

Some residents had reported seeing the site of a pallid old man wandering the halls. It scared them so badly they had to move out. At least that was the story surrounding the house. So one day, a philosopher named Athena Doris came to town and was looking for a place to live. There weren't many homes available in Athens at the time, so someone recommended the large roomy house which had been empty for years at that point. When Athena Doris asked about the price, he could not believe how cheap the home was being

rented for. Really? This entire house at a discount. Why? The man renting out the house got real serious and told him the tale of the last tenets. He told him about the sound of the chains and the frightening old man. But Athena Doris, being a philosopher, was unfazed by this story. He didn't believe in ghosts, it didn't make sense logically for them to exist. So he accepted the price and moved in with some of his pupils, figuring that this was just one of the many benefits of being far smarter than

the average man. That night, he asked one of his pupils to make him a bed on a couch and bring him some ink and a pen. He loved staying up late into the night putting his ideas down to paper, and so, after everyone else had retired to bed, Athena Doris stayed awake in his room vigorously writing, just the sound of his pen could be heard against the dead silence of the home. Hours passed, and he thought to himself what a genius he was. None of the ghostly sights and sounds that supposedly haunted the estate had bothered him the entire evening.

But what was that? Athena Doors put down his pen and looked behind him. The room was only lit by a small candle he kept by his paper, making the space outside of his open door on the opposite side of the room, too dark to really see. He paused, wondering if he'd hear the sound again. But there was nothing. Of course, there was nothing, he thought. There was no such thing as ghosts. There was again, the same sound. This time though, it was coming closer. On the other side of the dark doorframe, Athena Doris heard someone coming towards him,

walking, rattling, as if they were covered in chains. It's nothing. He thought to himself over and over again. It's nothing. But the sound said otherwise. The sound was distinctly that of someone walking down the hallway towards him. Finally, with his back still turned, Athena Doris could hear that whatever was coming down the hall was at his door, standing behind him.

There was no use ignoring it now, so he slowly turned to meet whoever was there. And that's when he saw that behind him, standing in the doorway, was a pallid old man with sunken eyes and a ghostly expression. The man looked exactly how he had been described to Athena Doris, except for his outstretched arm, an arm that was connected to the other by a thick, metal chain. At the end of the outstretched arm was a bony finger making a beckoning motion, calling the philosopher towards him. Athena Doris wasn't a believer, he was rational, but here, in front of him, which he was seeing with his own eyes, was a man telling him to follow.

In that moment, he knew he couldn't explain this away, so he grabbed his small candle, and together the two of them slowly started walking through the house. Down the long hallway where his sleeping pupils lay, the old man walked slowly and with a limp, as if the chains were incompering his movements. Where was this man leading him, Athena Doris wondered as he was led out of the house and into the backyard. It was there that the man seemed to de-materialize, as if let free from the house's confinement. Thinking quickly, Athena Doris took a stick and marked the area where the spirit left him.

And the next morning, he asked two of his pupils to dig up the spot. It must mean something, he thought. His philosophical mind still trying to make sense of what happened the night before. It was there in that very spot that the pupils discovered the petrified body of a man bound in chains. There were no records of who the man was or how he got there, but it was apparent he had

been in the ground for a considerable amount of time. Athena Doris ordered the body to be exhumed and for a proper burial of the man to take place. After which, the spirit never appeared in the house again. What I love about that story and what freaks me out about it is how even a 2,000 year old ghost story has the same elements as a ghost story today. Even last week I told the story of the stranger who heard a ghost walking down the hallway in his large roomy house. The ghost noises behaved somewhat similarly.

If these experiences are so consistent that even in the time of Pliny, people were talking about experiencing hauntings in the same exact way as today, it really makes you think. Has there always been consistency in the way that ghosts have tried to make contact? This next story I have for you is a real Halloween treat. What I'm about to share with you is maybe the scariest story that I've heard this year. It's the story of the devil, a pact, and one of the most cursed books on the planet.

This is the story of the Codex Gigas, also known as the devil's Bible after the break. This episode is brought to you by Better Help. So, some people in my life have called me a catastrophizer. As in, whatever the situation is, I will somehow think of the worst case scenario. Oh, I'm taking a flight. What if it falls out of the sky? Oh, it's Halloween. What if everyone else is wearing the same costume as me? I thought this was normal, like I thought that this was just how I was, until I started going to therapy. And I was told that this is actually a very not helpful thinking pattern that I can change. I guess it never occurred to me that I didn't have to constantly be preparing for the worst.

Some people are just able to live their lives not stressing out that much. And since I've learned that, I've used therapy for a lot of my adult life. One of the best ways to utilize therapy, at least I've found, is online. Because I can customize it to my schedule, and more importantly, I can wear sweatpants and lay in my bed, which is where I want to be when talking through hard stuff. Enter Better Help, a therapy service that's entirely online, so you can make it work for your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and you can switch therapists to find the right one for you anytime with no additional charge.

Make your brain your friend with better help. Visit betterhelp.com slash stay curious today and get 10% off your first month. That's better help, h-e-l-p dot com slash stay curious Codex Gigas translates to giant book which if you didn't know anything else about it would pretty much sum it up It's maybe the biggest surviving book from the middle ages we have the pages being three feet long and weighing in at around 165 pounds For my international audience that's 75 kilos and a meter long. Yeah, that's huge. It's believed to have been written by hand in 1230 in what is modern-day Czech Republic. And it contains a compilation of different resources. An entire Christian Bible has been written by hand inside. And in

between the passages of the Old and New Testament are lessons on math and astrology, a history of the people in the area, but also spells for demonic exorcisms. The author of this book is unknown. Scholars at one point thought the book had been written by multiple people, which honestly would have made more sense. To write out the book's contents by hand would take an estimated 20 years. But the handwriting is incredibly consistent, and the ink is all made from the same material, which suggests it was, in fact, one person who wrote it. This brings me to what the Codex Gigas is known for and why it's so terrifying to me.

By far, the most notable entry made by the Devil's Bible author is on page 577 of the 629 page book. Remember that the pages of this book are three feet long. There are many times the size of a regular book today. So the author would have gotten to this page years, potentially decades after they started writing the book. On page 577 is a large drawing of the devil. One of the largest to come out of the Middle Ages, actually. It doesn't look like how you would picture the devil to look.

It's far scarier. So scary that I actually freaked myself out just having it open in a computer tab while I was trying to write out the description. So I decided to record myself describing it because I thought that that would be faster. Okay, of course it's almost midnight when I finally got around to doing this, which is not helping my fear levels, but all right, I'm looking this up on the Library of Congress website. And I'm looking at it now. Okay. Okay, so it's this creature that has a human body and is squatting, but its arms are up.

Its face is green and it has these really big ears. Its mouth is painted red, which is really contrasted against the green of the rest of the face, and you can see all the individual teeth in its mouth. Also coming out of its mouth, it looks like its tongue has been bifurcated, or it's either its tongue that's been split in two, or it's something else, but there's two distinct tongues coming out of its mouth. It's also wearing this headdress and then it has two red horns coming out of its head. Also the eyes are looking in two different directions. I don't know if that was intentional.

So it's going down to his arms. His arms and hands look pretty human, but he has only four fingers on each hand and he has these really red talons coming out of each hand that are the same color as the horns. And then he's naked except for this loincloth that he's wearing. And his feet look the same as his hands, so he's squatting and then his feet are also foretoed with the talons coming out. Okay, and now I'm not looking at this anymore. This depiction of the devil is much different than other medieval depictions of him. For one, he's by himself, and he's walled up in a solitary cell.

Most medieval depictions show him presiding over hell. He's also wearing Irmine, a special fur that showcases royalty and status. But who drew this picture? And why is the devil portrayed in this way? Well, ever since the book was written, the legend of how it came to be followed. The legend states that in Bohemia in 1230, there was a monk that was set to be put to death, but not just executed in the public square. He was set to be walled alive. To be walled alive, the subject would stand in place while a brick wall was constructed

all around them. The subject would typically die of starvation or dehydration while trapped in the small, pitch black space, sometimes as tight as a coffin. The monk was terrified of his fate, and in a moment of panic, tried to strike a deal with the judge. If you let me live, I'll write a book that contains all human knowledge. That will take you ages, the judge scoffed. No, the monk pleaded.

I'll write it all in one night. The judge agreed to the monk's impossible challenge. He knew that when the morning came, the monk would just have a few pages written and would ultimately be put to death. So that night, he was put in a solitary cell with some parchment, ink, and a pen. As the cell was slammed shut, the clock started. Three, two, one, zero. The final countdown where you're on the very edge of your seat.

Those very last seconds of the game is what separates the truth fans from everybody else. The truth fans are the ones who are there through everything, every victory or defeat, agony or ecstasy. When that buzzer hit zero is when you need a Coke zero sugar the most, because true fans give their all. For every one timer, there's a fan cheering two times as loud. For every goalie standing on his head, there's a fan somewhere standing on their seat.

For every game going into overtime, there's a fan going over the top. For every penalty, every goal, and every action-packed minute of the game. When the clock hit zero, you deserve a Coke Zero Sugar, the one with irresistible taste and zero sugar. Because when are lose, Coke Zero Sugar is the most refreshing way to end the game. So when the buzzer hit zero, Selly with a Coke Zero Sugar. Best Coke ever? en el juego. Cuando el buzzer ha sido el 0, salió con el 0 con su chute. ¿Bien?

¿Eso es el chute? The greatest thing is that the fight will be better. You have the hours, the effort, the hard work. You are a fighter and this service is for you. Model, the brand of the fighters. Everything I did, I was imported by Crown Imports, Chicago and Illinois. All that night the monk wrote. And he wrote, and he wrote, and he wrote. He wrote until his hand cramped up, and then he kept writing until it was completely numb.

Around three in the morning, he looked at what he had accomplished. Hardly anything. He had barely gotten through a portion of the New Testament. How was he going to write the entirety of human knowledge by sunrise? So, he got on his knees and he started praying. First, to God. Please, God, help me do this and I'll do anything you wish. But as he sat alone in his cell, lit just by a few small candles,

he received no response. God wouldn't help him now. He looked at the window at the moon slowly marching towards the horizon. He had to figure out another way. And if God wasn't going to help him, maybe someone else would. In a moment of desperation, the monk got back on his knees. Satan, I pledged to you anything you want if you helped spare my life. When the monk opened his eyes, sitting in the darkest corner of the cell, where just a few flickers of the candles could reach was the devil. The devil we see in the Codex Giggas.

He told the monk he would help him finish the book, but in return, he must draw the devil as he actually is. He must show the world what evil, truly, looks like. The next morning, the monk presented the judge with the devil's Bible, a comprehensive account of human knowledge. His life was spared, and the world now had a real image of the devil to look at. But that's hardly where our story ends. The next time we hear about the Codex Gigas is in Austria in 1565. Prince Rudolph II is a Holy Roman Emperor obsessed with the occult. Historians believe that this obsession began after he had received an astrological reading

from a Suisseir who told him his father would die and Rudolph would be emperor. That Suisseir, by the way, was none other than Nostradamus. After he developed his obsession, Rudolph became determined to collect the Devil's Bible. Word of its cursed origins had spread throughout the Roman Empire, and Rudolf needed to add it to his collection. Eventually, he befriended the monastery that owned the book and they gifted it to him. Once it was in his possession, Rudolf would read it all day, and he especially was obsessed with observing the picture of the devil.

He soon became a paranoid shudden, closing his room in his castle off from the rest of the world so he could read the devil's Bible all day. And as a result, he was banished from the throne by his own family. He died a penniless outcast with no airs to take over his throne. After Rudolph's demise, the Swedish army captured the book and took it to their female king, Christina. Christina's father, King Gustav II, raised Christina as a boy as she was his only legitimate heir. Her official title when she was crowned was King. The Devil's Bible became her favorite confiscated manuscript.

But when she abdicated her throne and excommunicated herself years later, she left it behind. 50 years after that, the Codex was in a massive fire. It's believed it was thrown out of a window to escape the flames. Today, the Devil's Bible still resides in Sweden. If you ever have the chance to see it in person, you may notice that the page containing the devil is much darker than the other pages in the book. Some believe it's because the smoke from the fire only damaged the page the devil lives in,

like flames from hell coming to reclaim their king. But historians have another equally creepy theory as to why that is. The pages are made from animal hides, a material that tans in sunlight. The devil's page is the darkest because, throughout history, it was the page people looked at the most. Kings, Queens, Ampers, and monks alike could not take their eyes off the mysterious drawing on page 577. It's not just a spooky artifact we can't make sense of today. For the last 800 years, people have been trying to figure out why the devil is in this book and how he got there. Our final story is a tale that almost doesn't feel real.

When I first read about it in an old newspaper article from the 1930s, I thought that this was perhaps an Edgar Allan Poe short story. If you were to drive down, US Road 50, west of Madora, Indiana, in 1935, you would find an old, crumbling brick wall. It would honestly be hard to tell it was brick, but through the thick ivy and overgrowth covering it, you might be able to spot flecks of red. Next to it, you would see a pile of wood and more brick, and a picture might start to form in your mind.

Those are the materials used to build a house that once stood here in the 1800s, now reduced to a pile of rubble and one brick wall that barely still stands. This home used to be known as the most haunted house in the neighborhood, the locals would say. At night, it was believed you could hear disembodied whaling and groaning coming from the abandoned house, as well as occasionally catch a rath-like figure floating by an upstairs window.

Neighbors would scurry by as quickly as possible, not wanting to linger near the home for too long. But what is one thing we've learned about hauntings here at Heart Starts Pounding? They usually come with a story, and this one is no exception. The truth is that years before the house was declared haunted, in 1848, a woman named Sophia Douglas Wilson lived in the house with her husband, Dr. Creed Taylor Wilson, and their children. The couple had moved into the home when their youngest was five after Dr. Taylor

had retired from medicine. Being one of the only doctors in Lawrence, Jackson, and Washington County in Indiana was a lucrative job. He chose to retire essentially as soon as he could so he could spend his time raising his youngest with Sophia. You wouldn't be able to tell by looking at the pile of brick in 1935, but almost a century earlier when the Wilson's moved in, it was a home fit for a king. Dr. Wilson bought the land first and then built the house of his dreams on it. A two-story brick home with, quote,

hardwood floors, fine woodwork, broad stairway, and fancy glass design over and on each side of the door. Inside, the Wilson's had Persian rugs imported, as well as furniture brought from Kentucky and Ohio. Outside, the sloped yard was full of flowers, enclosed by an iron fence. It was the perfect place to raise a family. Their youngest, that five-year-old boy was named Asip, and he seemed to be his mother's

favorite. The two just got each other, so Fia always felt like Asip was the most similar to her. Kind, loving, but also stubborn. See, not all was perfect in the Wilson household. By 1861, the Civil War had broken out, and while their home was hardly near the battlefield, young Asip felt a desire to go fight. He was 17 now, a full-grown man, at least in his eyes, and he wanted to enlist to fight against the Confederates. But no matter how much he begged Sophia, she said no. He was too young and he was not to go fight. Asip, like so many lastborn children, marched to the beat of his own drum.

He had already made up his mind, so one night, under the cover of darkness, he and his neighbor ran away to enlist. They became drummer boys in Captain Tanner's company be 22nd regimen. Sophia was understandably devastated. Her son didn't so much as say goodbye before he just ran off. But he wrote her letters. Every week, Sophia would receive letters from Asip telling her about his life in the military. She heard about his thoughts on the war,

how he was making friends, and eventually, that he was being transferred to Missouri. After this transfer, Sophia received one last letter from her son. In it, he wrote, He wrote, �Mother, I will write you a few short lines to let you know that I am well, fat, ragged, and sassy. We are now on the war eagle, one of Uncle Sam's boats, on a way from Boonville to Jefferson City. This will probably be the last time I will write you.

For the male does not come up as far as our camp. We have been having a hell of a time lately. I have traveled near 600 miles now. Signed, Uncle Sam's ASAP. ASAP was right. That would be the last time he wrote to her. It seemed at first like the letters stopped because of his location. But weeks and weeks went by with nothing. And so Fiya started to worry, what if something had happened to him? The next letter that arrived at her door was one telling her that Asa had died from typhoid fever. But what happens to a young boy in the civil war who dies hundreds of miles from home?

He gets buried. Fast. Before Sophia had even received word of Asip's fate, he had been buried somewhere in Missouri. She never thought when she kissed his forehead and went to bed all those months ago that she would never see her boy again. Then a few months later in the frozen throes of January, the Wilson's got a letter from a Mr. Gray. He had located Asyp's burial site in a Methodist cemetery. So that April, as the ground began to thaw, Dr. Wilson had a metal casket shipped to the

cemetery for Asip to be exhumed and brought home. Sophia had been skeptical of this Mr. Gray. How did she know that he wasn't just some scam artist taking advantage of vulnerable families? just some scam artist taking advantage of vulnerable families. When the body was brought home, she demanded that the casket be brought upstairs and placed in front of a window for her to gaze upon the body and be certain it was her son. As they heaved the metal lid open,

she knew at once that it was ASIP. And this caused a sort of change to occur inside of her. All of a sudden, Sophia couldn't stand the thought of rebaring her son. He looked so peaceful in the beautiful light of the hallway. It was as if she stumbled in his room and found him sleeping. So, Sophia demanded that Asub's casket be packed with charcoal, the lid closed, and he be left inside the house. Every afternoon, she would sit in a wicker chair she had placed by the casket to sew and talk to her dead son. She did this every day for the next 12 years. Finally, in 1873, her husband had enough. He had been begging for her for over a decade

to let go and allow the boy to have a proper burial. But each time she rejected his request, he felt an immense sorrow for her and stopped pushing. It had now been enough time. It was time for his family to move on. So, he paid $50 to Mr. and Mrs. Kegwin, two spiritualists from Louisville, Kentucky, to come do a say-on by the casket. The pair arrived on a glum and drizzly afternoon to a crowd of neighbors who gathered outside of the Wilson's home. That evening, the Wilson family and the Kegwin sat in a circle and conjured the ghost of Asip. Would you like to have your remains buried?

Asked Sophia. Yes, Mother. Mrs. Kegwin answered, as if Asep were speaking through her. The next day, Asep's casket was taken to the cedar grove next to the house, and he was buried. Two years later, Dr. Wilson also passed away and was buried next to his son. 150 years later, each Halloween, children in Liesville, Indiana hear the story of the Wilson's told to them at school.

They even make replicas of the Wilson's house in class. Students imagine what it used to look like before the house was rubble underneath the thick, ivy and moss, before it was the haunted house the neighbors wouldn't go near. Back when it looked like the home that the Wilson's moved into with their little boy. Each of these stories sticks with me for different reasons. The Pliny story because it's just a really good modern ghost story that happens to be 2000 years old. The story of the Devil's Bible because of the centuries old mystery of it, it feels like it could be part of the Da Vinci code or something.

And the story of Sophia and Asip because, though it's tragic, I think it taps into something deeply human. And those three things together, a classic ghost tale, a hint of mystery, and a deeply human theme, make up just about all the best Halloween stories. So happy Halloween, everyone! Stay safe and don't go into any haunted buildings or have any say-ances without inviting me first. This has been Heart Starts Pounding, written and produced by me, Kaelin Moore, Sound Design and Mixed by Peach Tree Sound. Thank you so much to all of our new patrons you will be thanked by name in the. Thank you so much to all of our new patrons, you will be thanked by name in the monthly newsletter.

Special thanks to Travis Dunlap, Grayson Jurnigan, the team at WME, and Ben Jaffey. And thank you to Audio Boom. Have a heart pounding story or a case request? Check out Heart StartsPounding.com. Until next time, stay curious. Ooh. at crudetcoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucoucou