Lore - Episode 110: Crooked
Episode Date: March 18, 2019Not everything can be perfect. Even when there’s a clean slate and we’re given the resources and tools to make something great, humans have a way of building their flaws into it. And while there a...re many examples of locations built on a crooked foundation, few have the haunting historical tales to back it up. * * * The Lore book series: www.theworldoflore.com/books The Lore TV show: www.Amazon.com/Lore Latest Lore news: www.theworldoflore.com/now 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.
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Before we get started today, I wanted to thank you.
Today marks the fourth anniversary of the very first episode of Lore, and it's really
easy to feel nostalgic about how far we've come.
Sure, early episodes of the show are a bit rough, and yes, I've grown as a writer and
as a narrator.
But more importantly, the show has grown up and become something bigger than just a podcast,
and that's something to be proud of.
So thanks for four amazing, fulfilling years of tuning in and listening along to these
stories.
From everyone here at Lore Headquarters, we're grateful for your generous support and loyalty.
Lore listeners are the best listeners, after all, and I'm proud of that the most.
And now, on with the show.
It's not the largest, or the most beautiful.
It's not the oldest, or even the most historically significant.
There are countless other buildings that stand head and shoulders above it, and yet its name
is firmly implanted in just about every person's mind, thanks to decades of popular culture.
All you have to do is show someone a picture of it, and they'll instantly say its name
out loud.
The Tower of Pisa
Actually, they'll probably call it the Leaning Tower of Pisa, because that's its most obvious
feature.
That's because long before the tower was completed in 1372, it had already begun to
tilt off-center.
And that slow-motion topple has continued over the six centuries since construction
stopped, although modern efforts to correct the cause seem to have stabilized it, even
correcting it just a little bit.
Most people don't know two things about the Tower of Pisa.
First, it's actually a bell tower, and it doesn't have just one bell.
No, the Tower of Pisa has seven, tuned to the seven notes of the major musical scale.
But the other thing most people don't know is why the tower started leaning in the first
place.
It turns out it was built on a faulty foundation.
A ground beneath the lowest portions of the structure is too soft to support the weight
of all that marble, and so it began to sink on one side.
It seems that the original builders, the ones that began the work back in 1173, didn't
give proper attention to the foundational elements of their project.
And as it turns out, that's a flaw we've repeated over and over again throughout history.
Our cities, like the Tower of Pisa, are places that are built on some kind of foundation.
And in the chaos of building a community and all the infrastructure that it will need to
grow and thrive, mistakes can happen.
Issues can be woven into the fabric of a location, and problems can become part of the DNA there,
setting it up for a future of pain and misfortune.
And while the United States is full of examples of this idea in practice, we'd be hard-pressed
to find a city in our country with a more flawed beginning than its own epicenter of
power and authority.
Our nation's capital, Washington, D.C.
I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore.
To the millions of people who visit it every year, America's capital city looks ancient,
gleaming white marble, vast rotundas, and enormous statues of the greats who came before
us.
And all of those things are magnificent.
But in terms of world history, Washington, D.C. is barely a toddler.
In fact, if we were to hop into a time machine and travel back to the signing of the Declaration
of Independence, we would have discovered that the land Washington is built on was nothing
more than a collection of farms.
Sure, they had fancy names like Flint's Discovery, The Knock, and Port Royale, but they were
far from glamorous.
In fact, most of those farms were worn out and tired.
Years earlier, the leaders of the newborn United States needed a place to meet and make plans.
Initially, that place had been Philadelphia, which is where the Second Continental Congress
met in 1775.
But as the Revolutionary War picked up steam, British military actions forced that Congress
to become a bit more nomadic.
They met in Philadelphia in 1776, then Baltimore the year after that.
After that, it was back to Philly before moving on to Lancaster and then York.
What America needed was a permanent home, a seat of government that could be counted
on to remain in place for eternity.
And while that might sound like a simple challenge to solve, it proved to be more difficult
than they first thought.
Without digging into the deeper details, a lot of it came down to two things, the North
versus the South and money.
And yes, I understand that the Civil War, that specific period in our nation's history
when we see the North versus the South used the most, wouldn't take place until nearly
a century later.
But even in the early days of America, there was a divide there that created strife and
friction.
But in the end, the federal government passed the Residence Act of 1790 and gave President
George Washington the power to pick a location and begin building a capital.
That spot, it turns out, was a stretch of land along the Potomac River near the older
community of Georgetown.
It was over farmed, thickly wooded, and ready for development.
And to help with that, a French-American military engineer named Pierre Lentfont was
brought in to lay out the design for the future city.
We have Lentfont to thank for much of the basic layouts of Washington, D.C.
The decision to place the presidential residence on one hill while locating the houses of Congress
on another, the Grand Georgian Manors, the Stone and Brick Buildings, all of it was born
from his mind.
But it was a mind that also produced strife and frustration.
It seems that Lentfont was difficult to work with, and ultimately, after just a year on
the job, he was sent away, completely unpaid for his work.
And that black mark on his reputation would haunt him for the rest of his life.
When he passed away in 1825, he was practically penniless and was laid to rest in an unmarked
grave.
So much for the man who dreamt up the capital city.
We know so well today.
Things barely got better after that.
The buildings that did go up in the years to come had issues from the start.
According to historian Jeff Dickey, Washington's failure to flourish was almost comical.
There was an annoying lack of sidewalks.
The city lacked a sewer system and street lights.
You might look outside the window of your stately Georgian manor to see cattle grazing
in your yard.
And thanks to all of that, disease was a common problem.
When I think of the National Mall area today, I envision a city that is clean and put together.
Straight lines, white surfaces, and very well thought out.
But two centuries ago, it was a mess of muddy pathways and dangerous terrain.
America might have been a success, but the city that was meant to sit at the center of
it all was an early failure.
While the city planners had envisioned a metropolis for 200,000 people, there were barely 3,000
within the city limits.
Of course, things did eventually improve.
The transition from mud hole to mansions took some time, but as it grew and evolved, so
too did our government and the people they served.
Wealth flowed into the city, and as it did, the face of the city changed forever.
But the beautiful, elegant appearance is often little more than a facade.
Just like the people who lived there, Washington, D.C. was a pretty shell with a rotten core.
And if we were to take a ride down any of the wealthy avenues that crisscrossed the city
two centuries ago, we would see dozens of examples of the darker parts of human nature.
And every pretty surface, it seems, was a story of pain and loss and death.
Every story has a few sides to it, but not many can claim to have eight.
That's a pretty basic description of the Octagon House, a home built in 1800 by a man
named Colonel John Talo III.
It was designed by William Thornton, the same man who designed the U.S. Capitol Building,
and when Talo had it built, he was considered one of the wealthiest men in Virginia.
Immediately, the home became the center of life in Washington, D.C.
In fact, because the White House had been burned by the British in 1812, Talo offered
the use of his house to President Madison.
Two years later, the Treaty of Ghent was signed there, but not all of the events in this house
are tales to be proud of.
Apparently, Colonel Talo was a bit of a control freak, and that attitude might have actually
led to the death of two of his daughters.
The first occurred before the War of 1812, and was a result of a disagreement between
Talo and his daughter.
She had fallen in love, but her father disapproved, because the young man was a British man.
British military officer
The entire disagreement came to a head one day in the second floor hallway, right at
the top of the stairs.
In a heat of the argument, it said that Talo's daughter turned to run away, tripped, and fell
down the stairs to her death.
But as if that weren't enough, the legend says that another of his daughters died in
the same tragic way just a few years later, again, after an argument with her father.
Echoes of that tragedy have stuck around, they say.
Visitors to the house have claimed to see mysterious candlelight hovering over the top
of the stairs on the second floor.
Others say there is a corner of a rug on the first floor hallway that refuses to lie flat,
a reminder of where one daughter's body landed.
It's all mysterious and creepy, for sure.
But there's a problem.
It turns out none of Talo's children ever died in the Octagon house.
Perhaps the legends told by visitors today are meant to find logic in their unexplainable
experiences.
Or maybe it's just a bit of folklore on a muck.
Either way, it seems that the stories, just like the house they inhabit, have a number
of different sides to them.
Another house in the city with a bit of legends surrounding it is the Halcyon house.
Work on it began in 1787, built as a mansion for the very first secretary of the Navy,
a man named Benjamin Stoddart.
And if you've been paying attention, you'll recognize the name of the man responsible
for designing the home's garden, none other than Pierre L'Enfant.
Let's hope he got paid for that work, though, right?
The mansion is massive.
I've seen a few different numbers quoted in various sources, but it seems that the main
house is roughly 2,100 square feet of living space.
That's a lot of house to take care of.
And Stoddart apparently went broke trying to keep up.
The house passed through a number of hands over the years that followed, until a man
named Albert Adcit Clemens bought the place in the early 1900s.
Clemens immediately got to work fixing up the old mansion.
He apparently believed as long as he kept construction active, he would ward off his
own death, which sounds awfully familiar if you've heard the tale of Sarah Winchester
and her famous mansion in California, the Winchester House.
A lot of the work Clemens did was practical.
He added electricity to the place and connected some of the outbuildings, adding more square
footage to the mansion's overall footprint.
But he also added bizarre elements, like doors that opened onto blank walls and stairs that
went nowhere.
He was a big fan of creating rooms and then walling them up.
Some of them were tiny, barely larger than a closet, while others were big enough to
serve as crypts.
In fact, he was such a fan of burials that he was said to have had a number of mummies
buried in the fancy garden out back.
But all of that construction had an impact on the house.
Some say that after Clemens began to alter the original design of the place, the spirit
of Benjamin Stoddart began to appear.
Some witnesses reported seeing his figure, dressed in a tan suit, sitting in one of the
windows that overlooked the Potomac.
Others have seen him walking through the halls and sitting in various pieces of furniture.
The construction didn't work, though.
Clemens eventually passed away in 1938, and upon his death, a bizarre request was carried
out.
Because he had been terrified of being buried alive, he requested that his heart be pierced
with a sharp tool, just to be safe.
Whoever said it never hurts to be prepared has probably never had a knife pushed into
their chest.
Clemens might have left the mansion in bodily form, but there are stories that suggest his
spirit stuck around, joining the ranks of Benjamin Stoddart and other ghostly sightings.
Those who have lived there since his death have often found windows open wide after closing
them moments before.
Others say that items hung on the wall have a tendency to fall to the floor without reason.
Or perhaps it's all too easy to explain.
Albert Clemens spent a lot of time making that house just right, and he doesn't want
anyone else to change it.
Homes are tricky places.
Sure, they provide us with a place to live, but they also have the potential to be the
setting for darker events.
And no other home in Washington DC demonstrates that more completely than the White House.
Construction began on the site of the modern White House, all the way back in 1792.
It was built by a diverse collection of workers, most of whom were African-American slaves
and immigrants.
Compared to the place that LeFontes had envisioned, the finished house was much more humble in
appearance, but of course, it would grow over the years to come.
John Adams was the first president to live there, moving in with his wife Abigail in
November of 1800.
Legend says that she dried their sheets in the East Room.
Later First Lady Dolly Madison preferred to work outside, spending her time in the garden.
But of course, the Madison's had to move into the Octagon House after the British torched
the original White House in 1812, and it wouldn't be ready to live in again until 1817.
Of course, modern visitors claim to have seen echoes from those early years.
Some have caught a glimpse of Abigail Adams in the East Room, presumably still doing laundry,
while others have spotted Dolly Madison walking through the Rose Garden.
But whether or not these tales are true, they pale in comparison to what happened decades
after the mansion was built, when another family moved in, the Lincolns.
President Abraham Lincoln and his wife Mary had four children together.
Their second oldest, Edward, died from tuberculosis in 1850.
The same year their third child, William, was born.
They were loving parents, and I have to imagine the White House was full of laughter and cries
of joy on a daily basis.
For February of 1862, that was the month that young William, just 11 years old, died after
a battle with typhoid fever.
Understandably, the loss devastated the Lincolns, but it hit Mary the hardest.
She had already lost one child years before, and this newest death must have obliterated
all those years of healing.
As a result, she refused to let go, and spoke often of seeing William in different parts
of the house.
Their loss came at a time when spiritualism was incredibly popular, having been around
for roughly two decades at that point.
It was an open door that Mary pushed through in the hope that she might be able to speak
to her children once again.
And while her husband Abraham wasn't necessarily a firm believer in all the things taught by
the spiritualist movement, he was accommodating to anything that would bring peace to his wife.
Soon enough, there were regular seances taking place inside the White House.
Legend says that Abraham Lincoln would sometimes even attend and participate, but it was Mary
who planned and hosted them.
And it was during one of these many seances that the Lincolns met a man named Charles
Colchester.
Colchester was a spiritualist from England who arrived in the middle of the Civil War
with stories of noble birth and remarkable power.
He claimed to be able to hold sealed letters to his forehead and read their contents perfectly,
or cause fully visible spirits to appear during the seances he conducted.
It had brought him a lot of fame, and the Lincolns fell for it, especially Mary.
But it might have been Colchester's amazing performances that finally initiated his downfall.
Through their multiple seances, Mary Todd Lincoln had revealed a number of sensitive
secrets to Colchester, and he began to use that privilege to make big requests.
For example, he asked Mrs. Lincoln to provide him for a railroad pass that would give him
free transportation anywhere in the country.
If she didn't cooperate, he would expose her secrets.
But rather than cave into his demands, Mary called upon Noah Brooks, one of President
Lincoln's most trusted friends and advisors.
He decided that exposing Colchester would be the better option, so he attended one of
his upcoming seances.
This one involved a table full of musical instruments, which the Englishman claimed
he would invite spirits to manipulate while everyone held hands to prevent tampering.
After the lights were extinguished, Brooks waited for the instruments to begin making
music.
The moment they started, he let go of his neighbor's hands and lunged for the center
of the table.
His hand gripped something, and a moment later someone else lit a match, washing the small
gathering in a pale orange glow.
And there, in his hand, was the wrist of Charles Colchester.
The medium, of course, pretended utter outrage.
Brooks had broken the rules, and that was poor behavior.
But a few days later, Brooks managed to track Colchester down outside the White House, where
he scolded him for deceiving the President and the First Lady, and accused the medium
of being nothing more than a fraud.
After that, Colchester apparently hit the road.
He was never seen around the Lincolns, or even the White House grounds.
Ever again.
History, like the cultures and events that fill it, has a tendency to be a bit crooked.
It leans to the side and gives the observer the impression that something's not quite
right.
Of course, which direction it leans always depends on who wrote that particular part
of history, doesn't it?
We certainly tried, though.
Yes, there will always be weak spots in the foundation of any great movement or civilization,
but the majority of people do try.
Sometimes it's simply a matter of trying to manage our daily lives, despite the unpaved
roads or growing lives inside crooked houses.
Life, just like the history that records it, can lean a little, and each of us has learned
to adapt to that in our own way.
But there are always exceptions to the rule.
Places where the slant is a bit too severe, where a weak foundation or a crooked beginning
leave a lasting mark, a mark that can be felt centuries later.
And Washington, D.C. is one of those places.
For better or worse, it is a crooked city.
It leans.
And we can see it.
Others have been able to see that lean over the years as well.
President Lincoln's friend Joseph Henry certainly saw the lean in Charles Colchester, and while
he was never able to definitively prove that the man was a fraud while he was still hanging
around the White House, Henry did pick up on a little secret a few years later.
According to the story, Henry was on a train one day, where he met a man who made gadgets,
items used by performers to enhance their stage presence.
And he mentioned that he had designed and built a device for the famous spiritualist,
Charles Colchester, a sort of electronic sound machine that the man would wear on his upper
arm beneath his suit.
It seems that, yes, some things are too good to be true, or too powerful to be real.
Colchester had another secret, though, a friend, a drinking buddy, really?
You see, while he was staying in Washington, D.C. and providing ongoing spiritualist services
to Mary Todd Lincoln, he stayed at the National Hotel, located nearby on Pennsylvania Avenue.
And it was there that he became friends with a handful of other men staying there.
One of these men was apparently very upset about the war to end slavery.
He believed that owning another human being was a God-given right, and considered abolitionism
to be an abomination.
And over the months that he and Colchester grew to know each other, he allowed his guard
to drop lower and lower.
This drinking buddy was a bit crooked, you see?
One evening over drinks, his friend told Colchester and the others around the table
that President Lincoln deserved to die for his role in the war.
And he delivered that statement with such conviction, such passion, and confidence that
Colchester took him at his word.
Which is why later, the next time he visited the Lincolns at the White House, he warned
the president to be extra careful about his personal safety.
The president, of course, had heard warnings like that on a daily basis since taking office,
but kindly thanked the Englishmen for his warning.
Perhaps he dismissed it because it was nothing new, or maybe he ignored the medium because
he felt it was a poor attempt at some sort of prediction the sort that any sideshow
con man might have made successfully.
We don't know why Lincoln ignored him, but looking back from where we stand today, it's
clear that he should have listened.
Because Colchester's drinking buddy turned out to be a very dangerous man, a man who
leaned a bit too far in one direction, a crooked man.
And who was he?
He was an actor named John Wilkes Booth.
It's clear from the historical records that Washington, D.C. got off on a fairly crooked
start, thanks to a soft foundation and dreams that didn't match reality.
I hope hearing about it today has been as entertaining to you as writing about it was
for me.
But I'm not done.
I have one more location in the city that I want to take you to.
Look around after this short sponsor break to begin that tour.
Sometimes the hardest thing to deal with in life is life.
The never-ending series of unplanned, abrupt moments that seem to knock us off our path
and set us spinning.
The tragedies, both big and small, that step unexpectedly into our lives like Kramer sliding
into Seinfeld's apartment without knocking.
One moment we're at peace, and the next, everything is crooked.
Such was life for Henry Adams, the grandson of President John Quincy Adams.
He and his wife Mary Ann, who went by the name Clover, moved to Washington, D.C. in
1977, where they lived just across the street from the White House on Lafayette Square.
She was one of the earliest portrait photographers in American history, mastering the chemical
process used for development of the photos, which she did right there in her home.
And it was a happy home, too.
But that peace was broken in April of 1885, when her father passed away.
It was a blow that seemed to rock her to the core.
For months, she embattled the depression that came with that loss.
And as she did, Henry did his best to support her and encourage her.
But grief is a difficult opponent to wrestle with.
And in the fall of that year, Clover lost.
While Henry was out of the house for a dental appointment, his wife stepped into her dark
room and drank a solution of potassium cyanide, a chemical she used often to dissolve the
silver from photographic plates.
Its effect on her, though, was fatal.
Henry mourned the loss of his wife, as you might expect.
But he also took it one step further.
After her funeral and burial in Washington's Rock Creek Cemetery, he commissioned the famed
sculptor, Augustus S. Gaudens, to create a statue in her honor.
It took six years to complete, but when it was finished, it replaced her original headstone.
It features a shrouded figure seated on a block of granite, as if a person had sat down
atop the grave and covered themselves with a cloak.
S. Gaudens titled his work The Mystery of the Hereafter and the Peace of God that Passeth
Understanding.
But that's quite a lot to say.
Most folks have leaned toward a more simple name for the statue.
Grief
But the story doesn't end there.
You see, the statue became so popular that it was eventually copied.
In the early 1900s, a man named Edward Poush made a cast without permission and used it
to create a duplicate for a client of his, a Civil War general named Felix Agnes.
Ever since, the copy has been known as Black Aggie.
And that duplicate was placed in Druid Ridge Cemetery in Pikesville, Maryland.
It quickly became the focus of college hazing rituals and fraternity pranks.
Stories were made up about the seated figure, and legends about the grave it sat over began
to spread.
Because that's how folklore works, right?
But of course, there was more.
Black Aggie was said to have the ability to kill people.
The scenarios were fairly hard to imagine, which of course led to the attractiveness
of the legend.
But it was said that if anyone spent the night sleeping in the figure's lap, they would
die before morning.
Stories whispered rumors about the power of the figure's eyes, or how pregnant mothers
had been known to miscarry after visiting the grave.
It's the sort of folklore that you might expect to grow and develop around such a mysterious
otherworldly figure, and a powerful example of the human desire to fill gaps in history
with something, anything, that might answer our questions.
The folks that managed the cemetery in Maryland eventually had their fill of vandals and visitors,
and so in 1967, Black Aggie was donated to the Smithsonian.
They placed the statue in the courtyard behind the Cutts Madison House, a historic mansion
once occupied by First Lady Dolly Madison, which is an interesting location, to say the
least.
Why?
Because it happens to be just one block away from the Hay Adams Hotel, a hotel, mind you,
that was built on the site of an older home.
The home of Henry and Clover Adams.
This episode of lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with research by Robin
Miniter and music by Chad Lawson.
Lore is much more than just a podcast.
There's a book series available in bookstores and online, and two fantastic seasons of the
television show on Amazon Prime Video.
Check them both out if you want a bit more lore in your life.
I also make two other podcasts, Aaron Mankey's Cabinet of Curiosities, and Unobscured, and
I think you'd enjoy both.
Each one explores other areas of our dark history, ranging from bite-sized episodes
to season-long dives into a single topic.
You can learn about both of those shows and everything else going on over in one central
place, theworldoflore.com slash now.
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And as always, thanks for listening.