Lore - Episode 139: Heirloom

Episode Date: March 30, 2020

The way we treat the past is a great lens into the character of humanity. Sometimes we elevate it, but all too often we work to bury it. And while the excuse might be to make room for the march of progress, it also allows us to hide our worst mistakes and most painful tragedies. ———————— Lore Resources:  Episode Music: lorepodcast.com/music  Episode Sources: lorepodcast.com/sources  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.

It's the sort of thing you'd never expect to see. Standing on the western bank of the Delaware River, beneath the Betsy Ross Bridge in Philadelphia, there's something unusual beneath the waves, and some days when the tide is very low, they expose themselves to observant travelers. Headstones Now it's easy to assume it's just a pile of stones, and in some ways that's exactly what it is. A man-made breakwater, built by the same people who built the bridge back in the early 70s,

but the stones they used were actually headstones from a real centuries-old burial ground. They came from an area about 10 miles to the northwest, on the west side of the campus of Temple University. In fact, if you stand on the front steps of the Temple Performing Arts Center and look across the street, you can still see a low stone wall. It is all that remains of Monument Cemetery, a burial ground that fell out of use in the 1920s before it was purchased by the University in 1956 to allow for some much-needed campus expansion.

Disposing of the headstones was the easy part. It was the 28,000 graves that were much more problematic to relocate. Notices were sent out to living relatives of the people interred there, and roughly 8,000 of them came and took their loved ones to new locations. But over 20,000 graves seemed to have been forgotten, so the University moved them to a mass grave in a newer cemetery north of town. It's an interesting story for a lot of reasons. For one, knowing your track and field complex is built on the site of an old graveyard.

A graveyard whose headstones now help protect a nearby bridge is a great topic to pull out at parties. And for that, you're welcome. But it's also interesting for another reason. It shows us, with perfect clarity, how people tend to handle the past. We want progress. We want change. We want to move further down the cultural road, and sometimes the past can hold us back.

And just like the old Monument Cemetery, we often try to just pave over history and move forward, whether or not that's the best decision in the long run. It happens everywhere, but I think it's fair to say that there are few places in America with as much historical baggage than the city of Philadelphia. Whether it's the events that led to the birth of the United States, or the centuries of life and death that have played out there ever since, the city of brotherly love has become a reminder of a very powerful lesson. You can bury the pain and mistakes of the past and pretend it has all gone away, but

you can never keep it from coming back. I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore. Philadelphia is a city that needs no introductions, and it's easy to see why. Both of the United States founding documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, were written there, and the city played a pivotal role in the Revolutionary War. And it's also a treasure trove of American firsts, the first hospital, medical school, public library, and even the first zoo. But it didn't start off so special.

In 1681, King Charles II found himself with a problem. He owed a good amount of money to one of his admirals, and when that man's son paid him a visit, he assumed that the family would be demanding repayment. Instead, the admiral's son requested a charter to settle a colony in the New World. That son was a man named William Penn, and the colony he was awarded would become known as Pennsylvania. Interestingly, it wasn't his first bit of land in the New World. Just a few years earlier, he had purchased the colonial province of West Jersey, which

would one day become part of the state of New Jersey. And because of that, the gift of the Pennsylvania Territory turned him into the largest non-royal landholder in the world. But Penn didn't do the typical colonial European thing when he arrived. Maybe it was the visible aftermath of previous settlements in the territory. Decades of expansion by the Dutch and Swedish had left the local Native American people reeling, with waves of smallpox and armed conflict wearing them down over the years. William Penn arrived with the different plan in mind.

You see, he was a Quaker, part of an offshoot of Christianity that was heavily persecuted back in England. He understood what it was like to be a stranger under attack in a new place. So after arriving in the New World to build his new colony, he approached the Lenape people, negotiated a fair price for the land that he wanted, and then bought it. I get the feeling that from the very beginning, William Penn wanted to think a little different. He wanted people who lived in his colony to worship freely, however they chose. And he wanted their new community to exist in peace with the Native Americans who had

been there for thousands of years. The actual results were never perfect, but they represented a much better start than many other colonies at the time. Based on that foundation, Philadelphia thrived. By 1750, it had become the largest and busiest port in the American colonies, and it just kept on growing. Of course, it didn't help that it was home to great minds like Benjamin Franklin and Colonial spy Peggy Shippen.

So by the time the murmurs of revolution began to spread, Philadelphia was a natural center point. Much of what happened after that was probably part of your history lessons in school. The colony's state house there in the city was used as the location where the Declaration of Independence was signed, which is why, of course, they eventually changed its name to Independence Hall, and they used it again for the Constitutional Convention which hammered out the contents of the Constitution. But like any major city, tragedy wasn't far behind.

In 1793, a wave of yellow fever washed over the city, then home to roughly 50,000 people. It arrived in late July of that year, and by August 1, it was already claiming lives. It took four months to run its course, but it was so brutal that over 20,000 people actually fled the city, nearly half of those living there. When it was over, at least 5,000 people were dead. Today it's remembered as the most deadly outbreak of yellow fever in American history. All those dead needed to be buried, too, and that's the other legacy of Philadelphia that most people aren't aware of.

When you're one of the largest cities in the country, it also means that you have a lot of burials to do. In fact, Philadelphia has a massive amount of cemeteries, at least 210 by most counts, and part of that is all the fault of the founder, William Penn. In order for his freedom of religion philosophy to truly be lived out, one of the things he believed was that graveyards should be established by each religious group as they needed it, and as a result, rather than finding a few large burial grounds, the city filled up with scores of little ones.

And of course, the Revolutionary War and the American Civil War both increased the need for burial space. Eventually, the European garden-style cemeteries became popular, combining burial grounds with something closer to a park in appearance. In fact, Monument Cemetery was one of them, before it fell into disrepair and was paved over in the 1950s, of course. The time has a way of paving over things on its own, doesn't it? As the decades have gone by, more and more of those small, old graveyards have been replaced

with modern development, because humans are constantly looking toward the future, and oftentimes the past becomes a casualty in that process. To move forward, some people think that we need to leave our history behind. In a city like Philadelphia, though, history isn't just something that happened. It's alive and active and seemingly all around us. Try as we might, no amount of paving or construction can make it all go away. But if the stories that are still whispered about the city today are true, it's easy to see why they'd want to.

There's a lot to talk about in Philly. From Independence Hall to the Liberty Bell, it seems that the early days of the United States are on full display there, and because of that, those places and objects have become household names. But there are some lesser known ones, too. In 1770, a local group of laborers known as the Carpenter's Company of Philadelphia built a meeting hall for its large 200-member meetings. Four years later, delegates from 12 of the 13 colonies needed a place to meet to discuss

a British blockade of Boston Harbor, a meeting that is now known today as the First Continental Congress, and the Carpenter's Hall was the perfect spot. During the Revolutionary War, the building was home to a military hospital, changing hands between the Americans and the British at least once, and then when the dust settled, it became the home to the First National Bank. In fact, it was its use as a bank that caused one particular experience to take place. In August of 1789, two men entered Carpenter's Hall in the dead of night and then made their way down to the bank vault in the basement.

As quickly as they could, they filled their bags with over $160,000, a fortune close to half a million dollars today, and then they left, vanishing into the darkness. It turns out the locks on the building had recently been changed. The locksmith the Carpenter's Guild had hired, a man named Pat Lyons, did the work without any problems, but mysteriously skipped town about two days before the robbery. So while the authorities didn't know who the two thieves were, they did try to track down Lyons. After he was apprehended, he rolled on his partners in crime.

One man, Isaac Davis, was finally captured four months later while he was trying to deposit an obscene amount of money into another bank. This fellow thief, Thomas Cunningham, would never face justice though. It turns out that he actually lived in a room on the second floor of Carpenter's Hall, but died from yellow fever just a few days after robbing the bank. His rotting corpse was found later that week. Carpenter's Hall went through a lot of changes after that. Eventually, the upstairs boarding house was converted into an apartment for a permanent

caretaker, and it stayed that way for over a century. Even in the 1960s, a new family moved in. The first thing they noticed was the odd collection of noises they would hear each night. One of the first nights they encountered them, the thumps and banging sounds above them were so loud that they called the police to search the home. The police found nothing in the attic other than cobwebs and dust, but they did report a powerful stench. Perhaps it was just a dead animal, or maybe it was an echo of the thief who died in the

house from yellow fever. Years later, that same family reported hearing shouting in the lower level during the night. It sounded to them like a group of men were having a lively debate, with questions and shouts of agreements filling the room. It never seemed violent, but with that many people inside the building, the caretakers certainly didn't feel safe investigating. They stayed in their apartment that night, but when they were inspecting the meeting hall in the morning, they claimed to notice the scent of pipe tobacco.

But the oddest part of the experience was the date that it all happened. September 5th of 1974, exactly 200 years after the first meeting of the First Continental Congress. But Carpenter's Hall isn't the only building with shadows of the past inside it. South of the city stands another relic from the birth of the nation, Fort Mifflin. And while its tragic history happened long ago, some people think the aftershocks have lingered on. It was built by the British as Fort Island Battery in 1772, at what must have seemed

like the worst possible time for them in hindsight. Just a few years later, the Americans rebelled, and Fort Island Battery was taken over to use against the people who built it. They weren't too happy about that either, and in 1777, the British destroyed the structure with cannon fire from the Delaware River. It said that roughly 75% of the soldiers inside the fort at the time were killed in the attack, something that certainly must have left an echo of pain and suffering. After the war was over, the United States military rebuilt the fort, renamed it after

Governor Thomas Mifflin, and then kept it in operation for another century. It even served as a Civil War prison camp in the 1860s, adding another dark chapter to its painful story. Today there are a number of stories that are whispered among visitors to the fort. Some people claim to have experienced unusual sights and sounds inside the blacksmith shop located on the site, doors that move on their own, and the sounds of a hammer pounding on metal are all frequent occurrences there. Others have heard the sounds of screaming near the officers' quarters, and while there's

no way to prove it, stories have grown up around those sounds to provide an explanation. It's said that a woman named Elizabeth Pratt lived on the fort with her husband, a military officer, and their daughter, but family tragedy led to her taking her own life. To this day, visitors claim they can hear her, wailing and crying in grief. But the most haunted location in the forts, according to those who have been there, is inside one of the fortified gun structures known as a casemate. During war, the casemates were structures within the wall of the fort that would house the guns, with small openings to allow munitions to be fired at enemy ships.

But at least one of those casemates was used for another purpose. During the American Civil War, casemate 11 was converted into a prison cell for Confederate soldiers and war criminals. One of those was a man named William Howe, a Union soldier who killed his commanding officer before attempting to desert his post. Howe spent his final days in casemate 11, waiting for his trial and sentencing, and even carved his signature into one of the walls, where it can still be seen today. When they executed him, the Union forces actually sold tickets.

On August 26th of 1864, hundreds of locals handed over a bit of cash to come watch Howe stand atop the gallows with a black sack over his head, and then plummet to his death. And then they all went home. But there are stories that suggest that Howe never left. Some visitors to casemate 11 have seen odd shapes that move in the darkness, and the figure of a man in a Civil War uniform has been spotted there as well. And the clue that seems to suggest that this figure was William Howe? Well it seems that those who have seen him have been able to describe almost everything

about him, except for one glaring omission. His face, they say, is covered by something dark, shadows perhaps, or maybe even a black sack. Tragedy comes in a lot of shapes and sizes, and throughout the centuries, Philadelphia has played host to a variety of them. From hangings to outbreaks, battles for freedom and petty crime, pain and suffering has stained just about every page of the city's history. One of the more forgotten tales, though, has nothing to do with the birth of America, or

the war for independence. Instead, it's a tragic story of just how bad humans are at dealing with their own failings and mistakes, and it serves as a reminder of just how dangerous our actions and ideas can be. At the northeastern edge of the city is a neighborhood known as Summerton. Today it's part of the urban sprawl that is Philadelphia, but in the late 1800s it was home to a work farm for the mentally ill. Of course, an enormous amount has changed in the field of mental health over the past

century and a half. So what constituted mental illness back then was a bit of a gray area. In 1907, the farm was replaced by a set of buildings that would later become known as the Bybury Mental Hospital. It was a cluster of structures that would serve as the residence and treatment facilities for patients diagnosed by the local hospital as mentally ill. But in 1907, there was a common belief that all patients suffered from physical causes that could be treated in the same manner.

And sadly, that sweeping generalization led to decades of tragedy. The problems actually started in the local government, though. When the hospital was being built, the official in charge of the project allowed corruption and negligence to invade every aspect of the construction. Contractors were allowed to build the city exorbitant amounts of money for the smallest things, drying up the budget long before the facility was ready to open. As a result, much of the hospital was built with poor materials and with untrained labor. It's said that within the first decade it was open, one patient managed to escape the

residence by literally chewing through a wooden window frame. Another managed to pick the lock on their door with a kitchen spoon, illustrating two powerful lessons. The building was poorly made, and the patients wanted out of it. In 1917, the U.S. military paid the hospital a visit. The World War I had left them struggling to care for all the wounded soldiers returning from Europe, and they were inspecting hospitals on the east coast that might serve as overflow help.

But after inspecting the facilities at Baybury, they quickly changed their minds. The hospital was becoming less of a treatment center and more of a prison for the unwanted in society. Violent criminals were sent to stay there alongside actual cases of mental illness, creating a terrible mixture of human struggles. They had in the poor conditions and the vastly outnumbered staff, and it was a tragedy just waiting to happen. And that staff was part of the problem, too.

Sure, they were outnumbered, but they were also unqualified for the work that they were doing. In fact, a good number of the people watching over the patients were patients themselves, individuals who'd been promoted simply because they seemed more stable than the rest. As you can imagine, that was a recipe for disaster. In 1919, one of the local papers began to investigate the daily happenings at the facility, and the details they reported were stunning. In one report, it was claimed that two orderlies actually choked a patient to death in an effort

to subdue him. But because these men were revealed to be former soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, they weren't punished for their crime. Instead, they were given raises. Other employees of the hospital had less savory pasts. Public criminals were often sent to work there as an alternative to serving their sentences in prison. For the state, they were cheaper to care for that way, but they were also entirely unqualified

for the work they needed to perform. And in many cases, they used their positions to abuse the patients. By the 1930s, Bybury Mental Hospital was barely recognizable as one. Patients wandered the hallways completely naked. The truck used to deliver food to the facility was the same one used to haul away the dead. And violence and abuse were practically part of the system. So in 1938, the state stepped in and took over, renaming it the Philadelphia State Hospital. But the needed improvements never came.

The population had grown to over 4,000 patients, double what the facility had been designed to care for. And it would soon get worse. By the 1980s, conditions were so bad that the hospital was at risk of losing its Medicare funding. In the end, it was two tragic events in 1987 that helped close down the facility for good. In March of that year, a court ruled in favor of a patient who had been left in shackles for over three years rather than properly care for him.

And then three months later, a female patient went missing from the building. It would take over nine weeks to find her body hidden outside on the hospital grounds. No suspects were ever arrested for her murder. Those horrible revelations led to an investigation which finally resulted in an order to close down the hospital. Yes, the building sat empty for decades, as was so common with these old mental health facilities. And yes, its empty shell became home to all manner of unusual reports and activity.

But as far as I can tell, there are no collections of hauntings that people still whisper about today. And maybe that's all right. As for a building like the Philadelphia State Hospital, stories of ghostly visions and unnatural sightings aren't necessary to paint the place as haunted. Its past was already painful enough as it is. And while the things that were documented within those walls over the years certainly seemed to include monsters, they weren't of the supernatural kind.

Instead, it was us. History can be a tricky thing to manage. On one hand, it needs to be cared for and preserved so that we can pass it on to the next generation, like an heirloom. On the other, that heirloom is filled with all manner of unsightly mistakes. And it's easy to think the world is better if we never open it up again. Thankfully, there's a lot worth saving in Philadelphia. For every Bibrary Mental Hospital or Eastern State Penitentiary, there is an Independence

Hall or Betsy Ross House. So much of the history that has been saved is there to teach and inspire. And that's something we can all be grateful for. But it doesn't make the shadows go away. Thanks to federal regulations regarding asbestos, the Philadelphia State Hospital wasn't actually torn down until 2006, which meant that its hulking presence was there every day for years, reminding people of the horrors committed inside it in the name of science. Between the inhumane treatment of the patients there and the staff's barbaric approach to

mental illness, it's no wonder locals assumed for years that the place was cursed. In the decades between its closure and demolition, police were called to the property hundreds of times. There were building reports of satanic rituals and other criminal activity. Today, the land it once stood on is mostly occupied by a modern retirement home, although there are still some remnants of the old hospital's roads snaking around the southern edge of the property, reminders of a past that isn't so easy to bury. And over at Fort Mifflin, tourists still shuffle through each day to enjoy the experience.

It's hard to blame them, too. The layout and history of the fort really does set it apart, and so much of it has been preserved. If you were to stop by today, you'd be able to walk the grounds on the main level and also tour through some of the buildings, including the casemates down below. Visitors to the place seem to enjoy the educational nature of the tours offered there. In fact, many people over the years have walked out with a smile on their face, which they've blamed on one of the tour guides who assisted them.

They say this man dressed in impeccable period clothing and tells jokes and answers questions while he shares amazing forgotten details about the fort. It's supposed to be quite the experience. But perhaps it's a different kind of experience than everyone understands. You see, some of those tourists have stopped by the office before leaving, just to pass on a kind word about their entertaining tour guide. But it's said that the staff there have always sent them away with a bit of news that's both sad and unsettling.

No one fitting that description works at the fort. Philadelphia's past is unquestionably an American treasure. But I hope you've also enjoyed the tour through some of its less-savory locations, too. Because there's just as much to learn from the darkness as there is from the light, however unsafe it might feel. But Philly has also been home to the Bazaar, and I found one last tale that I think you're going to love. Click around after this brief sponsor break to hear all about it.

Johann Kelp was born in Eastern Europe in 1667. Although if I told you the country of his birth was Transylvania, you might conjure up the wrong ideas. Johann wasn't a bloodthirsty warlord. He was a scholar. In fact, by the age of 22, he had already been published multiple times and had earned a master's degree in theology. Johann was a thinker.

He loved wrestling with new ideas, challenging old ones, and carving a path for himself rather than following the well-worn ruts in the road. So it was no surprise when his studies led him to Germany, where he met another Johann, this one, Johann Zimmermann. Zimmermann was a disgraced Lutheran minister. He had a sort of revelation at some point in his career and began telling everyone he met that the Lutheran church was the Antichrist. Naturally, he was fired from his position, and that newfound freedom allowed him to craft

his own small cult. He called it the chapter of perfection, and by the time Johann Kelp arrived in Germany, it was growing. The group held a lot of beliefs that aren't particularly necessary for you to enjoy this story, but one of the key tenets of their faith was that a life in the wilderness would be a better way to wait for the end of the world, which Zimmermann predicted would arrive shortly. And what better place to look for that sort of environment than the New World?

And thanks to William Penn's insistence on freedom of worship, they knew just the colony to move to. They were set to depart Germany in August of 1693, but before they could, Zimmermann took ill and died. In his place, Johann Kelp was appointed the new leader of the chapter of perfection, and they boarded their ship and set sail for America. They arrived in the infant Philadelphia and then headed north, following the Skuckl River and then Wissahick and Creek north of that.

And that's where they built their first community, but they kept a low profile, most likely afraid of the same sort of religious persecution they suffered through in Germany. And there they dabbled in all sorts of less mainstream activities, like alchemy and numerology. They held festivals and spoke about visions from angels who visited them in their dreams. But mostly, they just spent hours each day in meditation and prayer. Johann Kelp began to call himself Kelpius, and if the records are correct, he later sat for a portrait that would turn out to be the first known oil painting in the New World.

But as the years wore on, the group began to shrink. There was a lot happening to the South in Philadelphia, a lot of exciting changes and modern advancements, along with steady work and social interaction, all things that were missing in their little community. And then in 1708, Kelp got sick. It probably didn't help that the man had been living in a cave for the better part of a decade. Most historians think that it was pneumonia that did him in, but not before he managed

to pass along an heirloom to his next in line, a man named Daniel Geisler. It was a box. Perhaps as big as a modern shoe box, but its contents were a mystery because the lid was locked, and Kelp told his assistant to take it south to the Skookle River and then toss it in. No one, he told him, should possess what is inside. Geisler did as he was told. Well, most of it.

He did travel down to the river, and he probably stood on the rocky bank with the box in his hand. But his curiosity got the better of him, so he backed away, found a hiding place among the rocks, and then tucked the box inside it, and then he returned to his dying master. Kelp, however, was having none of it. He instinctively knew what Geisler had done, and scolded him for his deception. Then with the lecture complete, he sent the man back to finish the job, and Geisler, like a dog with his tail between his legs, hurried out to do it.

Soon enough, he was standing on the bank of the river, and he sent the box sailing into the air. It said that when the container hit the water, it instantly ignited into a ball of fire. Knowing their experiments with alchemy, it could have been filled with some volatile chemical. But that's no fun in the world of folklore, is it? No, instead, it's believed that the box contained the actual Philosopher's Stone, which sadly vanished beneath the river's current, never to be seen again.

The chapter of perfection died shortly after Johann Kelp passed away, but there are still remnants of their community, if you know where to look for them. The cave he lived in like a hermit is still out there in the woods, like a rough-hewn tomb covered in moss and dead leaves. And there are neighborhoods all around it, because, of course, there are. People are good at burying the past, after all, and throwing up subdivisions on the site of an ancient religious commune certainly fits the bill, but it also makes it more difficult to see the past.

You'll know you're in the right area, though, when you see the street signs. Johann Kelp might not live there anymore, but plenty of people can say that they live near a place that he left his mark on. A street called Hermit Lane. This episode of Lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with research by Marseille Crockett and music by Chad Lawson. Lore is much more than just a podcast, though. There's a book series available in bookstores and online, and two seasons of the television

show on Amazon Prime Video. Check them both out if you want 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 of them. 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 more about both of those shows and everything else going on over in one central place, theworldoflore.com slash now.

And you can also 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. I like it when people say hi. And as always, thanks for listening.