Lore - Episode 175: Head Case

Episode Date: July 19, 2021

In our never-ending journey to discover what makes us tick, people have come up with some pretty surprising ideas. And in the process, they’ve given themselves permission to do some utterly terrifying things. ———————— This episode of Lore was sponsored by: Squarespace: Build your own powerful, professional website, with free hosting, zero patches or upgrades, and 24/7 award-winning customer support. Start your free trial website today at Squarespace.com/lore, and when you make your first purchase, use offer code LORE to save 10%. Hunt a Killer: Solve immersive murder mysteries from the comfort of your home! Learn more at HuntAKiller.com/​LORE​, and use the promo code ​LORE for 20% off your first box. BetterHelp: Join over a million other people taking charge of their mental health with the help of an experienced BetterHelp counselor. Visit BetterHelp.com/LORE10 today and use offer code LORE10 for 10% off your first month. ———————— Lore Resources:  Episode Music: lorepodcast.com/music  Episode Sources: lorepodcast.com/sources  All the shows from Grim & Mild: www.grimandmild.com 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.

For centuries, it was nothing more than a statue. The seated figure of the Buddha, with its gold-painted face and round features, had been kept at a temple in China since at least the 14th century. But a few years ago, it started to do some traveling. That was when the government of China loaned it to a museum in the Netherlands. As you might imagine, the process of transporting something that hadn't been moved in centuries made it possible to see new things. And this statue turned out to be more than it appeared.

After some restoration work revealed some mysterious clues, experts took the statue to a local hospital for a CT scan. Think of it like a three-dimensional x-ray, allowing them to build a virtual model of anything inside the statue. What they found, though, blew them away. It was the mummified body of a human being. Since then, further research has netted experts more answers. Most agree that the body inside the gilded statue are the remains of a Buddhist monk

who died at the beginning of the 12th century. A couple of centuries after that, his body was encased inside the statue. And then time did what it's so good at, helping people forget the secret inside. There's a bigger lesson here that I want to point out. For centuries, people passed by this statue and assumed that was all it is. They glanced over the stylized carvings of a smiling face and crossed legs and admired the craftsmanship of the object, never realizing that it was simply a mask covering something much more real.

Never judge a book by its cover. We've all heard it, but sometimes it takes a concrete object like this to make it feel true. Many humans are really good at judging things by appearance alone. But clearly, there is so much more to our world than we can see on the surface. But that hasn't stopped us from leaning into that flaw. So much so that it's become entirely automatic, like a compulsion or a mindless habit. A habit that has led us to do dark and terrible things.

I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore. For as long as humans have existed, we've been obsessed with what makes us tick. Why do different people have different personalities or different skills or different breaking points? How can two children from the same home and parents grow up into two vastly different individuals? These are just some of the questions that have haunted us for thousands of years. And of course, there have been people along the way who have assumed they had all the answers. About 2,000 years ago, the Greek physician Galen believed that it all could be boiled down to four distinct substances inside a human body, fluids that he called humors,

which I'm sure most of you have heard about. An imbalance of one of these humors, according to Galen, could result in illness or bad behavior. And I know how easy it is to look back and laugh at what we might perceive as primitive medicine. But some of Galen's ideas are still with us. If you've ever heard of a red-headed person referred to as hot tempered or fiery, that's all thanks to Galen and his humors, who believed that red hair was a physical symptom of excessive heat inside the body.

And as the centuries went on, those basic assumptions stuck with us. This idea that you could look at someone's physical characteristics and make a judgment about their moral character. Just think back to all the stories we've heard about witch trials. What was one of the key signs that they were always looking for when they interrogated the accused? Witchmarks. Little imperfections on the skin, like freckles or moles, that, in their mind, were actually

the place where they nursed their satanic familiars. And then, with the advent of the Enlightenment at the beginning of the 18th century, the focus began to change. Before all of those physical signs were given supernatural roots, like witchmarks. But a few hundred years ago, people began to see more of a scientific point of view, and the discussion leaned heavily toward crime and crime detection. Something else began to change, too, though. You see, for thousands of years, cultures around the world believed that the mind of

a person, all of our thoughts and personality and character, was located somewhere in the body, usually in the heart. But it wasn't until the Enlightenment that we began to question that, and much of that change was the result of one man, Dr. Franz Josef Gaul. Dr. Gaul was a physiologist from Vienna in Austria, who was active during the second half of the 1700s and early part of the 1800s. And according to him, it was the brain, and not the heart, that was the seat of all that makes us who we are.

All thoughts and passion and morality and everything else, all located in our heads, in our brains. His idea was pretty simple, actually. He believed that each aspect of our behavior was connected in some way to its own area of the brain. It was assumed that higher functions and qualities like civility and manners were located higher up in the head. Behavior that was less savory and seen as more animalistic were assumed to be lowered

down. After all, violent crime is often seen as a base behavior, so in a weird way, it sort of made sense. Here's how it worked. If someone engaged in violent behavior constantly, they were working the part of their brain that controlled violence and therefore made that part larger. It was like working out a muscle, making it bigger over time. And it was possible, according to Gaul, to run your fingers over a person's scalp and

feel lumps where those larger muscles in the brain were pushing against the skull. Many of the experiments by Gaul and his students and contemporaries involved measurements. They would take a group of people known to be violent criminals and measure their heads with a wide assortment of tools. Then they would measure people they viewed as the opposite of that and look at all the data and make assumptions based on the numbers. Up until the 1840s, this new discipline, referred to as phrenology, was seen as a hard science. But from the 1840s onward, it gained huge traction in the public space as well and began

to be more of a fad. It permeated all sorts of aspects of popular culture. Phrenology shows up in Jane Eyre and in Sherlock Holmes stories. Queen Victoria was a firm believer in it, as was Karl Marx. And I have to stop for a moment and point something else out, however uncomfortable it might be. Phrenology started out as a theory to help people understand the mind, but it became a major driving force behind racism in Europe and America. People began to look at the differences between civility and savagery and invent correlations

to the physical characteristics of African and European head shapes. It was wrong and evil, but it was also common and pervasive in all levels of society. And it's one of those embarrassing moments in the past when scientists were actually trying to find evidence that their racism was founded in physical truth. Another outcome of phrenology, though, was something that still has a way of attracting viewers today. You see, as with any study, the more samples one had, the better. Asking only a hundred people what their political views are isn't a good way to take the pulse

of an entire nation, and so phrenology practitioners began to collect human skulls in order to have bigger data samples. One man named Johann Friedrich Blumenbach put together a personal collection of nearly 250 skulls during the 19th century, but his was one of the smaller displays. A professor of anatomy from the University of Pennsylvania named Samuel Morton had amassed over 1,200 of them by 1850, and a British physician named Joseph Davis managed to collect over 1,700 for his own study. There was even military involvement on both sides of the Atlantic.

The Army Medical Museum in Kent in England only had about 600 skulls, but they came from all sorts of countries and cultures around the world. And in America, the U.S. Army Medical Museum built a collection of over 3,000, many stolen from Native American gravesites, executed prisoners, patients in asylums, and unclaimed deaths in hospitals. Phrenology had grown into something bigger than Dr. Franz Gaul had expected. Decades after his own death, his disciples and followers were demonstrating just how far they had wandered from the path.

It was no longer about understanding what parts of our biology make us unique individuals. Now it was about finding new and better ways to study the skull, to treat it more like esoteric fields like fortune-telling or palm reading. And at the center of it all was a focus that only grew over time. It was an obsession grounded in a mixture of fear and hope, one that drove scientists to dig deeper for answers that might be applied and used, rather than just observed. One that offered a tantalizing possibility. What if, by studying human skulls, we could ultimately stop crime?

In 1853, two men found themselves on trial in Melbourne. Patrick O'Connor had arrived in Australia from Ireland just three years prior, although he filled that short time with a number of crimes. His new friend, Henry Bradley, had lived there much longer, since 1840, but he was far from perfect himself. On September 14th of 1853, though, it seems these two men partnered up for a violent crime spree. Despite the fact that both of them had jobs that paid high wages, they broke into a number

of farmhouses in the area where they tied up the people who lived there and stole their shotguns. Then, armed with what they needed, they knocked on the front door of a final home, this one belonging to a man named Mr. House. It was the son who answered. Bradley and O'Connor demanded to be let in, shouting and waving their shotguns, but rather than come to his son's defense, Mr. House slipped out the back, frustrated the two men tied everyone else up and then shot another of the adults staying there, killing him instantly.

And then they fled, what little cash they had managed to find in the home tucked away in their pockets. By the time they were finally captured on October 1st, they had shot several more people, stolen a boat, and taken a number of others hostage. So it should come as no surprise to any of us that their trial seemed like an open and shut case. And it was, honestly. Both men were sentenced to death by hanging, and on October 24th they stepped onto the

gallows and said their final words. But here's the problem. The people of Melbourne were really tired of executions. It seems that there were hangings every single day, often in multiples of two or three. It was giving Australia a bad reputation, and they wanted to stop it. So after O'Connor and Bradley were dead, their skulls were examined for signs that could explain their behavior. It wasn't very scientific.

These physicians went into the process already biased. They weren't looking for objective evidence, but rather for confirmation of their already agreed upon conclusion. So naturally they determined that both men possessed the skulls of someone without self-control or intelligence. Another powerful example of phrenology at work took place in Maine in June of 1834. That's when a nine-year-old boy named Major Mitchell ruthlessly beat a classmate named David Crawford.

I won't go into the dirty details of the attack, but just know that Mitchell left poor Crawford, bloody, bruised, and lacerated from head to toe. And when his mother found out, the authorities were called in. Mitchell immediately confessed to the crime, and in November of 1834 he went on trial for the violent assault. And that's when something interesting happened. As part of his defense, his head was examined and measured, and the reports were submitted as evidence.

Why? Because it seems that Mitchell had been injured years before, resulting in a blow to his head, which had left a lump that had never gone away. A lump, they said, that was located on the part of the brain that controls destructiveness. In other words, Mitchell had no control over his actions, and shouldn't be blamed for what he did to David Crawford. It was the first time in American history that a defendant tried to get a less severe sentence because of what they claimed to be a brain disorder, but the judge wouldn't

allow it. The terminology, he said, was just a theory, and heavy decisions like this needed to be made based on hard fact. So Mitchell was found guilty, and despite being a nine-year-old boy, was sentenced to nine years in prison and hard labor. One last story. Diego was born in Spain in 1810 to a poor family, but he grew up with a strong desire to better his station in life.

So as he grew older, he moved to Lisbon, the capital of Portugal, where he started working as a servant to a number of very wealthy families there. But that would only be enough for a while. One of the things that he noticed was that all of the homes he served in were located along a massive aqueduct, a sort of man-made river on a raised platform designed to transport fresh water from the outlying countryside into the city. It had been built in the mid-1700s, but it was modeled on ancient Roman examples, and it did its job well.

Diego noticed that it also served as a bridge for farmers and merchants traveling into the city from the countryside. Every morning, they would follow the flow of the water into town and sell their goods to support their families. Then in the evening, they would follow it back out to their homes, their pockets full of coins. He saw this as an opportunity and began to take advantage of it right away. Each afternoon, he would climb up and follow the aqueduct out of town aways, and then wait

in hiding for one of those coin-heavy merchants to appear. When they did, he would attack them, rob them, and then push them off the ledge, letting the 200-foot drop do the rest of the work. Early on, the authorities didn't seem to notice the few bodies that were found at the foot of the aqueduct. The liberal revolution of 1820 had left the city of Lisbon and the surrounding area in a deep economic depression, and suicide wasn't uncommon. Folks were just jumping off the bridge.

That's all. But as Diago kept up his crime spree, the numbers started to become more difficult to ignore. Soon enough, at least 70 people had been found dead as a result of his activities, and that got the attention of the police. So he made a change, hiring a team of accomplices to help him break into the nice, wealthy homes he once worked inside. In late 1840, Diago Alves and his gang of thieves were all captured after robbing a

local doctor's house and killing four of the people inside. He was hanged in February of 1841, falling to his death through the gallows' trapdoor. He had used a thing designed to bring life into the city, the aqueduct, and turned it into a river of death. And he paid the ultimate price for it. But his death came at the same moment that a new thing called phrenology was sweeping through Portugal. So in an effort to better understand why someone would do the things that Diago Alves had done,

his body was taken to a medical facility, where his head was removed and placed in a glass jar for future study. Obviously, the goal was to render his head down to nothing more than a gleaming white skull, measure its contours and bumps, and make an assessment. But that day never came. For whatever reason, his severed head remained untouched for years, eventually making its way to the University of Lisbon. And it's still there to this day.

We might not know what made Diago Alves tick, but the fact that his head is still floating in that jar makes one truth abundantly clear. No matter how our skulls are shaped, we humans are capable of horrendous things. Joseph was a lover of music. And I know what you're thinking, who isn't, right? Everyone has a favorite songwriter or band or live performer. But Joseph was a super fan. And being a well-off young man in Vienna at the turn of the 19th century, he had a lot

of music to choose from. We know that he loved music because of the records he kept. You see, Joseph was an accountant working for Prince Nicholas II of the powerful Esther Hasey family, and he applied that accountant mindset to his concert attendance, recording each and every performance in a ledger, including the date, location, and musician. In fact, he was so obsessive about it that those records are still helping music scholars today piece together what the music scene was like in Vienna back then. Not like any true superfan, Joseph wasn't content to just attend these performances.

He had to meet the artists as well, and because of that, he knew one of the greatest. Joseph Haydn is widely considered the father of the symphony by music historians today. He, just like our accountant friend, Joseph Rosenbaum, worked for the Esther Hasey family as their court musician, but he also composed his own music and taught others. In fact, Haydn was one of Beethoven's early teachers, as well as mentoring Mozart and his two young sons. So here they were, two Josephs in Vienna at the turn of the 19th century, Rosenbaum and Haydn, both passionate about music and both very well connected.

Now they weren't the best of friends, but they were friendly, and Rosenbaum seemed to worship Haydn for his obvious musical genius. You can imagine how heartbroken Rosenbaum must have been when Haydn passed away on May 31st of 1809. The world had lost one of the greats, and the younger accountant had lost a friend. But his death also came at a time when the Napoleonic Wars were making life difficult for the people of Vienna. So instead of an elaborate celebratory funeral, the composer was taken outside the city and

given a simple burial in nearby Hunsturm Cemetery. And that was it. Or at least, it should have been. But just a few days after his quiet burial, Haydn's grave was violated. Doug opened in the middle of the night by a local grave robber. It was a grim scene, really. You can picture the grass painted in silver moonlight and the hundreds of grave markers standing up like broken teeth, and a lone figure, shovel in hand, turning over the soil

as he dug for his prize. When Haydn's coffin was opened, the grave robber did not steal his belongings or even strip the body and take it to a medical lab, as one might expect. Instead, he cut off the dead man's head, dropped it into a cloth sack, and then filled the grave back in. When he was finished, he picked up the sack and his shovel and headed back to the entrance of the cemetery. And waiting for him there was a figure hidden in the shadows, a man who had hired him to

do the unthinkable. The severed head was exchanged for payment, and the grave digger wandered off into the night. And when the mastermind finally stepped out of the darkness, he was probably thankful there was no one else around to identify him. Because after all, folks in town knew who he was. The Accountant Joseph Rosenbaum It seems that Rosenbaum had a secret.

Not only was he a lover of music and a friend to many popular performers in his day, but he was also a student of phrenology. That up-and-coming science that had shifted the center of our personhood from the heart to the head. And it just might be that he had prepared for this opportunity for a while. Because just a year earlier, he and some friends had done the same to a recently deceased local actress. A trial run, if you will.

The next steps were more dirty work. The removal of the flesh from the head, until there was nothing left but the skull of his old friend Joseph Haydn. For that, Rosenbaum paid a physician to help him, most likely watching over his shoulder as skin and muscle were pulled away. And when the task was finished, he took his prize home. Now, there's a tendency to see this story as nothing more than one more follower of phrenology collecting yet another skull to measure.

And that might have been partly true. But Rosenbaum also wanted to capture the genius of the composer to preserve it and admire it. And that genius, according to phrenology, was mapped out in the contours of the dead man's skull. Once home, Rosenbaum had a special display case built to hold his relic and surrounded it with other musical collectibles. If he'd been alive today, that probably would have included ticket stubs and limited edition

posters from the concerts he'd attended. It was a display that represented this odd mixture of grim violation and deep respect of love and admiration taken way too far. And in that way, phrenology becomes a natural expression of a lot of our flaws as humans. Our desire to learn and grow and better understand who we are has often come at the cost of human rights, personal responsibility, and social boundaries. We take things too far and justify every sin along the way as necessary for the common good.

Dr. Franz Gaul did it, and so did his students. The skull collectors who dug up Native American graves in the service of science also did it, and so did Joseph Rosenbaum. Looking back, it all sounds more than a little crazy. And that's probably because it was. In the end, phrenology really did teach us what it means to be human, not through the information each skull unlocked. But by the way, they were collected.

The work of Dr. Franz Gaul unlocked a mysterious door for a lot of people. This belief that human nature was written in our biology, mapped out in our very skulls, was tantalizing and addictive, and I think that's the most clearly seen in the stories of those who collected them. One early student of phrenology was an Englishman named George Combee. He was lured into the pseudoscience by the possibilities, and so he placed an order for dozens of high-quality casts of human skulls. When they arrived, though, it said that he lost all hope because he couldn't see a single

difference between them. And that's the irony of phrenology. In the pursuit of what it is that makes us individuals, humanity was stripped back to nothing more than white bones, ultimately dehumanizing all of them. We wanted to figure out what made these people different and ended up with the exact opposite. Now, phrenology didn't leave nothing but destruction and error in its path. There are ways in which modern medical science can thank those early misguided students of Dr. Gaul.

The biggest contribution hands down is that shift in our understanding of where the human mind is physically located. Thanks to Gaul, the brain has become the important organ that it is today. Also, the old theory that tied specific functions to certain areas of the brain proved to be true. Of course, those early maps were completely wrong, and the bumps on the skulls had nothing to do with human behavior, but the idea got us into the neighborhood. Today, it's the bedrock of neuroscience and has allowed us to make huge advances in treating

certain illnesses with brain surgery and implants. But for Joseph Rosenbaum, none of that was important. For him, it was all about preserving the genius of a man he knew in life to make sure that the skull that once housed his powerful mind was given a place of importance. Haydn was, after all, a beloved composer and respected by many. But Rosenbaum's plan hit a snag about a decade after the composer's death. Prince Nicholas II, his former employer, and Haydn's main patron, decided that the musician deserved a better burial than that quick and simple one he'd received in 1809.

So in 1820, he gave orders to disinter Haydn's remains and move them to Eisenstadt. But when it arrived, the coffin was opened and the contents were examined, revealing that the head was missing. Prince Nicholas was furious and set a police investigation in motion to solve the mystery. And eventually, that investigation led the authorities to the front door of Joseph Rosenbaum. I want you to picture the police bursting into his home, spreading out and beginning their hunt through every box and shelf and cupboard in search of Haydn's skull. And picture Rosenbaum and his wife, Teresa, watching it all happen.

He standing nervously in some corner, and she reclined on a small daybed. And if you notice a twinkle in her eye, there's a good reason for that, because she had seen them coming and stashed the skull away inside the mattress that she was now resting upon. The police left that day empty-handed, but the prince was not going to be deterred. Finally, after being offered a cash reward, Rosenbaum confessed to the theft and agreed to hand over the skull. After doing so, the prince changed his mind and refused to pay the promise reward. It seems that the accountant came out the loser in the deal.

Well, that's what it seemed like. But in reality, Rosenbaum had assumed the prince wouldn't be so trustworthy, so he had handed over a different skull instead, keeping Haydn's white dome tucked away in some dark corner of his house. Both men had tricked the other, but only Rosenbaum knew the truth. Years later, as he lay dying in bed, Rosenbaum told a friend about all that had happened. Then he decided that it was time to let others enjoy the genius of Haydn's skull, so he instructed his friend to take it and deliver it to a local museum.

And that's where it stayed for many years. In 1954, Haydn's body and skull were finally reunited after a head game unlike any other. The great composer had decomposed, but his bones were now complete. It was a journey with many twists and turns, although few would guess it by looking at his beautiful decorative crypt. At the end of the day, phrenology might not have opened the world up to a whole new branch of science, but it certainly did teach us an awful lot about ourselves. Science has often driven people to cross the line between right and wrong.

Obviously, today's exploration of phrenology gives us a lot of good examples to back that up, but sadly, there are others, and not all of those violations were inflicted on the dead. Stick around after this brief sponsor break to hear one more frightening tale. Some things have a way of hanging around a lot longer than you'd expect. For example, if you've ever heard someone refer to themselves as left-brained or right-brained, you probably nodded with understanding, but that notion is actually an artifact from the days of phrenology.

Back when Dr. France Gall proposed his idea that the brain was really made up of a lot of smaller organs, and each one had its own function, it was all the craze to try mapping them and setting up standards. But in the middle of the 19th century, scientists in France began to move toward a more holistic idea that the brain activity was a result of the entire organ, not smaller pieces of it. They were trying to disprove phrenology. To get rid of what they saw was a silly idea, but they hit some snags.

One example took place in 1860 when a French surgeon named Paul Broca discovered a number of patients who had suffered strokes and then encountered speaking problems all seemed to have lesions on the same area of the brain. Even today, that part of the brain is referred to as Broca's area. It seems that Dr. France Gall might have been on to something. Certain areas of the brain were specialized, and this was put to the test in Germany during the 1870s by physicians who used electrical charges to stimulate the brains of animals, typically dogs and monkeys.

But we have an American to blame for taking it a bit too far. When Mary walked into the Good Samaritan Hospital in Cincinnati, Ohio, she was looking for help. Mary, like a lot of young women in the 1870s, had grown accustomed to wearing a fashionable wig, and hers was built on a framework of whale bone which had been rubbing against her scalp for a long, long time. That spot had become infected, and over time the wound had actually started to open up wider and wider until not only was part of her skull exposed, but a part of her brain was too.

I have to imagine that she was in a lot of pain and looking for someone to help her get better. Also on January 26th of 1874, she was introduced to neurosurgeon, Dr. Robert Bartolo. Now that probably sounds like a good thing to you. Woman with hole in head meets neurosurgeon is probably the best sort of headline in this situation, but Bartolo was more than a surgeon. He was a follower of a number of those German doctors who had been testing animals with electric shocks to their brains.

So while Mary saw him as her savior, he saw her as a chance to learn more. One last note though, all of the research we have been able to dig up about her situation makes it clear that Mary was not going to survive much longer. This was 1874, long before antibiotics, and an infection powerful enough to have eaten away part of her skull meant that she was not long for this world. I'm not justifying what happened next, but I hope it offers necessary context. Dr. Bartolo welcomed Mary into his care, explained the procedure that he wanted to try on her and then received her permission to do so.

Then he attached two small electrodes to her brain through the opening in her skull, turned the knob on a generator, and watched the effects of a small trickle of electricity on his patient. Mary was reported to twitch from the current, mostly on her right side. The fingers on her right hand even moved involuntarily, which caught Bartolo's curiosity right away. So he then moved the electrodes to another part of her brain and repeated the process. This time, Mary cried out in pain. Moments later, she passed out, slipping into a coma that lasted roughly half an hour before waking back up.

Mary was sent home after that, but he called her back two days later. If the first experiment had been challenging and cruel, this session would prove to be barbaric. Rather than using a small amount of electricity as before, Bartolo cranked the knob wide open. Somehow, with another human life suffering and crying out in front of him, he calmly made notes about the location of the electrodes and the effects of the current on that part of the brain. Mary didn't handle the ordeal very well, as you might imagine. Her lips turned blue, she felt overwhelmed with dizziness, and the pain was utterly excruciating.

So one of the nurses used chloroform to help her sleep, and then she was taken home. But it would turn out to be her last journey. The next day, Mary discovered that she couldn't get out of bed due to paralysis that had taken over her entire right side. Mary Rafferty meant so little to Dr. Bartolo that he didn't even record the dates of her death. Thankfully, her gravestone tells the rest of that story for us, listing her death date as March 3 of 1874, roughly five weeks after the experiments had started.

She had only been 30 years old, but suffered more than anyone should be expected to. Dr. Bartolo went on to publish his research, but surprise surprise, he was met with an enormous amount of criticism for his unethical study. He published an apology a short while later, but by then, Mary was dead and gone. He had been so enamored with moving forward that he never stopped to notice the sacred line he was crossing in the process. As we've learned so many times in the past, folklore is often an attempt to better understand the world around us.

But if you've read enough stories, you know that most of the time, we've gotten it wrong. But even in those rare instances when people are actually right, human nature has a way of driving us to take things too far. And that's a personality trait that we don't need a skull to agree on. This episode of Lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with research by Sam Albert and music by Chad Lawson. Lore is much more than just a podcast. There is 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. And I also make and executive produce a whole bunch of other podcasts, all of which I think you'd enjoy. My production company Grim and Mild specializes in shows that sit at the intersection of the dark and the historical. You can learn more about all of those shows and everything else going on over in one central place, grimandmild.com.

And you can also follow this show on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Just search for Lore podcast, all one word, and then click that follow button. And when you do, say hi. I like it when people say hi. And as always, thanks for listening.