Lore - Episode 100: Home Sweet Home

Episode Date: October 29, 2018

Every movement has a seed, that spark that sets the fire ablaze. But this spark is more than just a murder mystery, or a treasure hunt, or even a haunting unlike any other. This one is all three. Which may explain why a century and a half later, the world is still reeling from its impact. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com Access premium content!: https://www.lorepodcast.com/support See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In July of 2018, archaeologists in Egypt announced an amazing discovery. While working at a dig in the ancient city of Alexandria, a sarcophagus was discovered that dates back over 2,000 years. It's a massive block of black granite that measures over 9 feet long by 5 feet wide and was buried 16 feet below the surface. It's the largest of its kind ever found in Alexandria and a rare discovery in a location that's been combed over by archaeologists for centuries. But what's truly fascinating about the black sarcophagus is that somehow, against all odds,

the lid had never been opened. When news broke about the tomb, the world became obsessed. Jokes about ancient evils locked away, or of curses that could end the world suddenly became popular memes on social media, and people began to ponder the obvious question. What in the world would they find inside when they finally opened it? What we witnessed in the aftermath of the announcement was proof of a very particular characteristic that most people share. We hate locked doors.

We want to know what's behind them, what secrets might be hidden away. We seem to have an innate desire to open things that are closed off to us. But of course, that's not always a good thing. While some doors might be benign, hiding nothing more than winter coats or boardgames, other doors are therefore a reason. They act like a barrier between us and unsafe places. They protect us from whatever dangers might lurk on the other side. They stand guard, separating our peaceful existence from the darkness of the unknown.

Which is why they are both incredibly attractive and utterly terrifying, depending on what they reveal to us. Some doors, you see, can't be shut. I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore. It's a small town, and it always has been. That's pretty common for most of upstate New York, though. It's a land of mountains and lakes, and lots and lots of trees. Sure, the vast wildness of it all is broken up here and there by human civilization.

Places like Rochester and Syracuse come to mind. But for the most part, there's not a lot going on. And that was just as true in the middle of the 19th century as it is today, if not more so. Most accounts of the period describe the area as barely settled, and the folks who lived there were cut from a rougher cloth. There were always exceptions, for sure, but not in Arcadia. That whole region, by the way, the land between Lake Ontario and the Adirondacks, has long been referred to as the Burned Over District.

It's a term coined by Charles Grandison Finney back in the mid-1800s to describe the constant waves of religion that seemed to crash over the area. Finney likened it to a forest fire, and after a while, the folks there were honestly just burned out on it all. But a forest fire doesn't just consume all of the trees in undergrowth. It also lays the groundwork for something new, by fertilizing and revitalizing the soil. So even though the region had already played host to countless Methodist circuit riders, the birth of Mormonism and the spread of the Millerites,

it was impossible to say they'd sworn off religion entirely. Time would tell. In the cold months that straddled 1847 and 1848, Western New York was experiencing one of their worst winters to date. In fact, as one local newspaper reported, people had become so consumed by the harsh, cold, and bitter weather that most of them forgot that Christmas was approaching. That's when John and Margaret arrived, along with their two children. Their four oldest had already grown up and moved out,

and they were looking to make a fresh start. Their oldest son David owned a farm just outside of Arcadia, and their plan was to build a house near him and put down roots. But winter had stalled the construction, so when they arrived in the tiny hamlet, they were forced to find lodgings elsewhere. What they found was a tiny house on the edge of town, owned by one of the original settlers of the area, a man named Dr. Henry Hyde. It was a simple house, with two open rooms in the front,

split by a set of stairs that led to the second floor and a pair of bedrooms. There was a large pantry, a kitchen, and a cellar. It wasn't ideal, but for a family of four, it would work until the new house was ready. The family was Methodist by Association. John worked as a blacksmith, and while I can't find any descriptions of the type of work he did, it's said that he was an intense and inward sort of man, who most people found to be pretty disagreeable. His wife Margaret was the opposite of all of that.

She was social and talkative, known to be kind-hearted and a pleasure to be around. Their two daughters, Maggie and Catherine, were 14 and 10 respectively, although the youngest would turn 11 a few weeks after the move. And honestly, there was nothing special about the family or their home. They were just one more clan of settlers who had decided the burned-over district would be their new home. By spring, though, all of that would change. In the middle of March of 1848, John and Margaret climbed into bed after a long day of hard work.

I can almost imagine the cold sheets against tired muscles, and that wave of exhaustion that hits you the moment you lay your head on the pillow. But they weren't going to get sleep just yet, because that's when they heard a knock. It wasn't a knock at the door, though. That might have been expected, however unusual for such a late hour. Note, this knocking came from somewhere inside the house. They ignored it for a few minutes, thinking that the house was just settling, but it continued long enough to pull all of them, even the two girls, out of bed.

Together, they searched the house, but came up empty-handed. Frustrated, they went back to bed, and eventually managed to fall asleep. But the knocking didn't stop, and it returned the following night, and the one after that. Night after night, the family would climb into bed at the end of their day, only to be disturbed by the mysterious knocking sounds. On Friday, March 31st, though, things changed. The family had retired to bed early, hoping to get enough sleep before the disturbances began again, but the knocking returned right on schedule.

All four of them were awake at this point, and discussing what they should do when the youngest daughter, Catherine, tried imitating the sounds by snapping her fingers. When she did, the knock sounded back as if in reply. Maggie, the older of the two, tried something new. She spoke out loud and asked whoever it was that was responsible for the knocking to imitate her. Then she clapped her hands four times. In response, four knocks sounded out in the house. Both of the children were unsettled by this, but their mother seemed intrigued.

So intrigued that she began experimenting with the sounds. Count to ten, she called out, and then in response, ten slow knocks were heard. Clearly, someone was hiding in their house, perhaps in the cellar, and she had their attention. So she tried a more difficult challenge. She asked for a series of knocks that would correspond to the ages of her children. It took a while, but who or whatever it was doing the knocking delivered on that challenge. Six sets of knocks sounded off the ages of each of Margaret's six children. But then, after a short pause, a new set of just three knocks was added on. Margaret was stunned. They had six children, but the knocks had come in seven groupings.

She wasn't stunned because it was incorrect, though. Quite the opposite, in fact. You see, John and Margaret once did have seven children, but one of them passed away at a very young age. Just how young? Three. Just like the three mysterious knocks. It's easy to assume that John and Margaret had a unique situation on their hands, but that would be incorrect. In fact, history tells us that it's a lot more common than it should be. A thousand years earlier, in the year 858, a chronicle by Rudolph Ofolda spoke of communicating with what its author referred to as a wrapping intelligence. In 1520, German theologian Philip Melanchthon recorded that mysterious knocking was reported in the city of

Oppenheim. And nearly a century later, in 1610, a priest from Eyre, who was known only as Mr. Welsh, recorded his own experience of communicating with a mysterious being through wraps and knocks. And of course, long-term fans of lore might remember the story of John Mompasson, the magistrate from the English town of Tedworth. In 1661, his household was bothered in much the same way John and Margaret's was. Joseph Glanville, author of the earliest account of the Tedworth events, noted in 1681 that an invisible being actually answered the drumming of the people inside the house with matching sounds of its own. One last example, and one with an unusual connection to the Methodist Church, John Wesley, the founder of that denomination, noted in his

family memoirs that his father's household experienced a similar sort of phenomenon. At one point, their home was filled with a supernatural storm of wraps, knockings, footsteps, and even groans. It happened often enough that his parents gave the invisible being a name, Old Jeffrey. So, when I tell you that John and Margaret weren't able to sleep for much of March because of all the wrappings they heard, I don't want you to think it was unique. Special, perhaps, because most of us have never heard mysterious knocking sounds in our homes, but certainly not a one-of-a-kind event. They were, in a sense, the newest of many. What did make their experience unique, though, was that it had become a conversation, and not

just a knocking-and-response sort of conversation, but one with depth. Then all of that credit falls squarely on Margaret's shoulders. She was the only one to test the being, to build rules, and a system. She even managed to set up a way to answer questions by requesting silence for a no, and knocks for a yes, which is how she pressed deeper into the conversation. Are you an injured spirit? She asked out loud. Two wraps came back in reply. Yes. Were you injured in this house? Again, two wraps. Is the person who injured you still alive? Two more wraps followed. The conversation continued this way for a time, allowing Margaret to put the pieces together. The spirit claimed to have been murdered right there in the house just a few years before. He

had been a 31-year-old man who left behind a wife and five children, two sons and three daughters, if we're keeping track. Then after being killed, his remains were hidden in the cellar. It was all quite a lot to take in, and understandably, Margaret and the others didn't think anyone would believe them if they talked about it. Instead, they decided to show someone, to let them experience firsthand the same thing they had heard, which is why, despite the late hour, Margaret sent John out into the cold night air to fetch their neighbor, Mary Redfield. Mary was known to be a level-headed woman who spoke her mind. Surely, she would bring a skeptical view into an unusual situation. She later reported that while she had heard of the nightly knockings

from John and Margaret's daughters earlier that winter, she had never taken it seriously. But all that changed the moment Mary asked out loud for the spirit to knock five times. And it complied. There was a moment that triggered an avalanche, and their lives would never be the same. Mary called for her husband to join them, but others followed as well. Before midnight, there were at least 15 neighbors inside the house, all listening to the spirit reply to questions and give more details about its dark past. The next day, Saturday, April 1st, those 15 people told others, and by the time the sun set,

the little house was packed with close to 300 eager observers. That's 300 fresh sets of eyes and ears, 300 new minds to process everything they experienced, and 300 hearts thumping loudly from the thrill of it all. Of course, in a sample size that large, there are bound to be doubters. Even hearing the wrappings with their own ears wasn't good enough for many of the people there that night. They suspected fraud, as any of us might today, so they did the only logical thing they could think of. They searched the house from top to bottom. Try as they might, though. No one was able to find a hidden prankster. They looked in every corner in crawl space, even splitting up to see if they could catch the culprit on the move. But not a single piece of

physical evidence was found that could expose the fraud. At one point, everyone left the bedroom where the wrappings had been heard, and then the door was locked. Then they gathered in the room directly beneath it and called out for more answers. The knocking responded in the usual way, clearly coming from the bedroom above. It was frustrating, I'm sure. Everyone could hear the sounds. Dozens and dozens of visitors, with nothing to gain by joining up with Margaret and John, would all go on record as having witnessed it all personally. But despite their attempts to explain it all away with logic and reason, they had come up empty. And that was a problem. Because if they couldn't find a natural explanation, all that was left was the supernatural.

Humans are curious animals. When presented with a riddle, our minds race to find a solution. When questions remain unanswered, we take enjoyment from the process of digging deeper to close the loop. We love story, sure. But at the end of the day, what we want most of all is the truth. On the first night of ghostly conversation, when Margaret sent John next door to grab Mary Redfield, they were beginning that process of grasping for answers. Mary, to her credit, arrived as a skeptic, but the events she witnessed quickly turned that doubt into belief. In response, she dashed out of the house to grab another friend of hers, Mrs. Duesler. At this friend's request, her husband, Mr. Duesler, came along.

He was a lot like Mary had been. He was full of doubt, even going as far as to mock the very idea of communicating with spirits. But by the time he and his wife arrived on March 31st, there was already a crowd in the house. And that made him curious. In fact, most of the people who had come to visit refused to step foot into the bedroom where the knocking had been taking place. Maybe Duesler saw that as a challenge, or perhaps all of that communal fear wore down his initial skepticism. Whatever it was, shortly after arriving, Duesler was standing in the bedroom, calling out questions to the unseen entity, and recording his answers. Some of the questions repeated things that Margaret had already learned,

but Duesler seemed to dig deeper than she had. He uncovered the story of the spirit's untimely death inside the house, but he also managed to pull in more details to paint a bigger picture. One new clue turned out to be the dead man's occupation. He'd been a peddler. Today we have online shopping and the local market to take care of our needs. But in 1848, things were a bit different. If your town didn't have a general store, you'd have to travel far out of your way to find the nearest one, where you would then purchase the things that you needed. Food, supplies, clothing, all of those items waited for you in a far-off shop. Peddlers tried to meet the more immediate needs of people living far from a general store.

They were traveling salespeople, equipped with a wagon or a cart full of goods, who would arrive in town to sell what they could before wandering off to the next place. They carried important items with them, as well as non-essential valuables, and of course, a good pocket full of cash from all their business. Peddlers are pretty common in folklore in general. They take a lot of different shapes, but they always stand in for the outsider, and their ability to appear and disappear with more freedom than the people rooted in the town made them a bit more mysterious than most. Duesler uncovered a lot of the same information about the peddler as Margaret had, such as the fact that he left a family behind, but he added initials for the man's name, C.R.

And according to the spirit, the motive for his murder was the trunk full of valuables, as well as the $500 in cash he carried on his person. The murder took place on a Tuesday night, years before. He had been given a place to stay in the house, and his host had run a butcher's knife across his throat. It was a startling accusation, so naturally everyone gathered there began to wonder which of the house's previous owners had been the killer. Together they were able to assemble a list, beginning with John and Margaret and working their way backwards. Each name was read aloud for the spirit, and then the crowd would hold their breath and wait for the knocking that signaled the correct name. Finally, they found one, John C. Bell.

It was a name that made a lot of sense to a lot of people. The bells had lived in the house for a few years, but about five years prior to 1847, they had packed up and left town without a word. It had left people feeling uneasy, but at the same time, no one had suspected anything nefarious. Now, though, it all felt like a natural fit. Deusler actually gathered a group of helpers and made the journey to the town of Lyons about eight miles to the east. He hoped to confront Bell with these startling revelations and draw a confession out of him, but when they arrived on the man's doorstep, Bell denied any involvement in a murder, which left the burden of proof on Deusler and the others. If they couldn't get a

confession, they would just have to find evidence that could stand up in court. Then the justice system could take over. To that end, they returned to John and Margaret's house and began a search for the peddler's body. The clues they would need, just like the clues that identified John C. Bell as the killer, would come from the invisible spirit in the house. Among the details that had been uncovered the first night was the location of the body. The peddler, knocking in response to questions asked out loud, told everyone that his body was in the cellar. So that's where they began their search. Deusler set Mary Redfield's husband, Charles, into the cellar and told him to walk around slowly. They asked the spirit to knock when Charles was standing over the burial site.

It was a paranormal metal detector, except this one was constructed of human beings and the buried treasure would be a dead peddler. Digging didn't net them anything, though. Less than three feet down, the workers hit groundwater. A pump was brought in to help them end dig deeper, but the hole just continued to fill up. Assuming they were fighting a losing battle against the spring thaw, they decided to wait until summer, when the ground would be more dry. When they reconvened a couple of months later, digging was much easier. Five feet down, they struck a wooden plank, something that should not have been there unless someone had buried it. Removing it, they dug deeper, and that's when they struck gold, metaphorically speaking, of course.

There in the dirt was a grizzly collection, a large amount of burnt charcoal, a few small fragments of bone, and something much more sinister and out of place. Several human teeth. It was unusual, but it was far from proof. In fact, what little they were able to uncover failed to satisfy those looking for the truth. There had been no body, only a small amount of evidence that hinted at one. It was the smoking gun without the gun itself, just a thin curl of smoke hanging in the air, and that made it impossible to consider the matter closed and done. It was enough to cause some people to doubt the situation entirely. They believed that there were simply natural noises in the house that had been misinterpreted as some

sort of communication from the other world, leading the neighborhood to fall down a rabbit trail of murder and cover-up. But there were other things that pointed toward it all being true. First, there is the testimony of a woman named Lucretia Pulver. She had lived with the bells for a while right around the time the murder was supposed to have taken place. According to her, a peddler did indeed arrive at the house one day. She described him as perhaps 30 years of age, dressed in light gray pants and a black coat. She recalled the peddler talking with the bells, showing them his various items for sale and making small talk. Lucretia seemed to think that perhaps the bells knew the peddler already, perhaps from prior visits or maybe through a

family connection. So, she felt that she could trust the stranger enough to buy something from him. Before she could, the bells abruptly fired her and kicked her out. They claimed it was because they lacked the money to pay her, but that if they were ever in need, they would call her back for small jobs. Lucretia was forced to return to her mother's house until she could find new employment, but asked the peddler to come visit her there so she could buy an item she was interested in. The peddler agreed to stop by that very night. He never showed up, though. In fact, he seemed to have vanished from town completely. Three days later, she was called back over to the bell's house to resume her duties there. But things felt odd. There was tension in the air,

and certain clues seemed to jump out at her. First, Mrs. Bell, the woman who had fired her due to lack of funds, had a fun time showing off all of the new items she claimed to have purchased from the peddler. Then, there was the stack of clothing she wanted Lucretia to alter, items that were all too large for Mr. Bell to wear. Included in the mix was a pair of light gray pants and a black coat. While she was there doing her work, Mr. Bell spent most of his time in the cellar. Mrs. Bell claimed that rats had been digging up the dirt floor down there, and he was carting in loads of fresh dirt to fill in the damaged area. None of it felt normal to Lucretia, though, and she couldn't help but report it later

when questions arose about the bells. One of the bell's friends was a woman named Anne Pulver, who also happened to be Lucretia's mother. Anne was a weaver, but she lacked the space at home for her equipment, so the bells kindly allowed her to store and use them at their place. And one day, long after the peddler's disappearance, Mrs. Bell told Anne of an odd encounter. She and Mr. Bell had retired for the night, only to be disturbed by pounding or knocking from other places in the house. Mr. Bell climbed out of bed and walked through the house, shutting every closed window until he felt the noises were solved. In the end, the couple blamed the sounds on rats. The sounds continued, though. Sometimes,

it sounded as if someone were walking around the house, while other times it was more of a simple knock. Lucretia, who had returned to live and work in the Bell House, claimed to have experienced it all for herself on more than one occasion. And once, a friend spent the night in Lucretia's room, and when the women awoke the next morning, both of them independently reported the mysterious sounds. The details of that experience were intriguing as well. Both women reported that the sounds began as arbitrary wrappings, but they quickly transformed into the sounds of movement, as if someone were walking through the house during the night. The women claimed the footsteps traveled across the kitchen to the center of the house, and then down the

stairs to the cellar. There was only one problem with that, though. The Bells had left earlier that day for a visit with friends in Laak, Berlin, 10 miles away. Lucretia and her friend were the only people in the house. The next couple to move into the house was Michael and Hannah Weekman, and while they might have expected a normal place to raise a family, what they found instead was something far less normal than home sweet home. Not long after moving in, Hannah claimed that they heard the sounds of knocking somewhere in the house just after she and Michael had gone to bed. Her husband got back out of bed and ran to the door to see who might have come to visit them

so late in the evening, but found no one there. Once he was back in bed, the knocking sounded again, and he returned to the door only to find no one waiting for him. Hannah said she convinced Michael to stop checking because she was afraid that someone might be trying to lure him outside where they might harm him. In the end, Michael agreed, and the couple tried to get some rest. The experiences continued over the time they lived there. On more than one occasion, the couple's eight-year-old daughter screamed for them in the middle of the night. When they asked her what was wrong, she told them that something was moving about her room, even passing over her face and head. She said it felt cold, like a winter wind.

Michael had his own unusual experiences, too. He claimed he often heard his name called out by someone in the house when he was certain he was the only one at home. The constant, though, was the knocking. It was benign enough to fool someone into answering the door from time to time, but every time he opened it, there would be no one there. One more eerie encounter bears repeating. There was a short period of time where the weakmens had a guest staying with them in 1846. She claimed that she was working in the kitchen one day when she glanced up and saw a strange man standing in the doorway between the kitchen and the downstairs bedroom, and she wasn't sure how he got there. That's because the only way the

man could have walked to that spot in the house was by passing directly through the kitchen, and she would have noticed something as obvious as that. Yet there he was, standing calmly in the doorway with a blank expression on his face. And I can understand how unsettling that would have been, but perhaps not as unsettling as the description she later related to the weakmens. He was a young man, she said, perhaps in his 30s, and dressed in a simple outfit, light gray pants and a black coat. I'll admit that the house John and Margaret moved into came with a lot of baggage. The trouble is, it all gets a bit murky when we throw in the mysterious knocking sounds and the apparent

communication with the spirit causing it all. It's one of those stories that sits on the edge of belief and doubt, and it's not easy to process. But we can't deny that Margaret opened a door. What exactly that door revealed, I think, is up for debate. If we believe that it revealed the presence of an invisible entity, then we can easily assume the rest to be true. The spirit revealed a murder, named the killer, and located the evidence, however sparse it might have been. That's one option. The other is to chalk all of the wrappings and knocking sounds up to natural explanations. The story of the murder is just that, because it lacks any evidence to back it up. Yes, people had unusual experiences in that house, but without any body to point at,

it's impossible to definitively label everything as fact. Still, the fallout from their experience in that house has left a lot of people wondering, and much of it was documented. The events that took place the weekend of March 31st, 1848, generated dozens of written and signed eyewitness testimonies. John and Margaret's stories were backed up by strangers and friends alike who visited the house and witnessed it all for themselves. We can be skeptical, sure, but that's a lot of evidence to ignore. It was an experience that hinted at a dark past, at events that took place long ago that needed to be exposed to the light of the present. But what's interesting to note

is just how much the future was impacted by all of it. Because most historians agree that whatever happened that weekend in 1848 sent out ripples that touched millions of lives. I told you that the house had a connection to the town founder, Dr. Henry Hyde. The house burned down in the 1950s and the town is barely on the map today, but you can still do a search for Hidesville and find where it all was. But while the epicenter is gone, the waves that rushed outward have left their mark. All thanks to John and Margaret Fox. After everything settled down, their two daughters, Kate and Maggie, began to experiment with their own forms of communication with the spirit world. By 1849, they were standing on the stage at Rochester's Corinthian Hall,

a lecture hall that had played host to Charles Dickens, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Susan B. Anthony, and Frederick Douglass. They demonstrated, right there in front of a sold-out audience, that the world beyond our own was alive and active, and if we knew how to open the door, we could interact with it. All you had to do, I suppose, was knock. Historians today point to the Fox sisters as the founders of one of the most powerful religious movements of the 19th century, known as spiritualism. They toured for decades to spread the word, and countless imitators followed in their footsteps. When the civil war left the country devastated physically and emotionally, it was spiritualism that filled the void, providing

the grieving with a thread of hope. In 1888, though, 40 years after that crazy weekend in Hidesville, the Fox sisters announced that their act had all been a hoax. The knocking sounds their audiences had heard from the stage weren't spirits at all, just the clicking of their ankles as they rotated their feet. It was smoke and mirrors, and it called everything they claimed into question. Everything except that house. Kate and Maggie may have been frauds, but the events that inspired them were something else entirely. It doesn't get talked about enough, but throughout most of that weekend of 1848, the girls weren't even in the house. They left the craziness with their mother Margaret,

while John stayed behind to help visitors and investigators, and John was the only one of them to never claim anything close to mediumship. Like I said before, the house burned down in the 1950s, taking the true hero of the story out of the picture. It was the house that started spiritualism, not the Fox sisters, and it's sadly been lost to time, but not before giving us one final big reveal. You see, in 1904, a group of children were playing in the house when they came upon something completely unexpected. Some of the children had gone down to the cellar, where they accidentally broke a portion of one of the walls. When the homeowner went downstairs to inspect the damage, he saw something he wasn't expecting, something inside the wall.

After bringing in some help, he and the others managed to pull back the pieces of the wall to fully reveal what had been hidden inside, and then they stood and stared. It was a wooden trunk and a human skeleton. Everyone loves a good origin story, so I hope you enjoy the tale behind the rise of the mysterious Fox sisters. But before you assume there are no more skeletons in the closet, so to speak, I have one more tale to tell you about that family. Stick around after this short break to hear all about it. It runs in the family. At least, that's what people love to say, right?

Me, I have a propensity toward bad puns and dad jokes, something I inherited from my father, and his before him, from what I understand. Some families produce generations of athletes, or artists, or musicians, or even business tycoons. It runs in the family. Kate and Maggie Fox spent most of their life pretending to be mediums, sitting at the center of an entire movement that hinged on the premise that the living could speak with the dead. It was a world that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes novels, actually wrote a lot about. According to him, mediums were people with a certain amount of what he called magnetism. This sensitivity to the world around them allowed them to tap into the

spirit world, and because of that, they could send and receive messages between them. Doyle didn't think that this supernatural gift was tied to things like morality or intelligence, though. In other words, he didn't have to be smart or a good person to be a medium, but it did appear to be hereditary, which is why it's not surprising that before the Fox sisters, there was their mother, Margaret. Thanks to today's story, we know that Margaret made a lot of it possible when she began communicating with the spirit in their little house in Hidesville. She was the one who set up the system of knocks in silence that helped reveal the tale of murder and intrigue that had been hidden in the house for years, and that makes a lot of sense.

According to the stories, Margaret's maternal grandmother was known to get up in the middle of the night in a trance-like state. Family legend claims that she would actually walk out of the house and across the street to a nearby graveyard. Fearing for her safety, Margaret's grandfather would always get up and follow her. The story would always be the same, although the faces were different. The cemetery, she claimed, was full of activity. She would describe the people who had died and the funeral procession around them, the horses and crowds, and familiar faces from the community. The next morning around the breakfast table, she would recount what she had witnessed in vivid detail, who had died, who attended, whose horses had pulled the coffin in the procession.

Her husband, of course, saw none of this, yet her stories left those who heard them depressed. As always was the case, within weeks of hearing a story, an actual funeral would take place across the street. Every detail. Exactly as she had described. This episode of Lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with research by Sam Alberti and Music by Chad Lawson. Speaking of, the music in today's episode is an original album just recorded by Chad Lawson called Home Sweet Home. It will be available for streaming and download purchase on November 2, but you can pre-order it right now. You can head over to ChadLawson.com slash lore to learn all about it. I make two other podcasts, Aaron Mankey's Cabinet of Curiosities

and Unobscured. Just like Lore, both are explorations of dark history, with Cabinet of Curiosities focused on small little tales of curious things, while Unobscured is a 12-episode season that dives deep into a single topic. This season, The Salem Witch Trials. I write and narrate both of them, and I think you'd love them, so check them out. Lore exists outside this podcast, too. There's a Lore book series in bookstores around the country and online, and a Lore TV show on Amazon Prime Video. The second season came out on October 19th, and it's just waiting for you to check out if you want more Lore in your life. You can always learn about everything going on over in one central place, The World of

Lore dot com slash now. And if you're a social media person, you can follow the show on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Just search for Lore podcast, all one word, and then click that follow button. When you do, say hi, and I like it when people say hi. And as always, thanks for listening.