Lore - Episode 191: Throwing Voices

Episode Date: January 31, 2022

One of the oldest and most common beliefs in the world is also the source of intense fear and debate. But there are historical events on record that make it difficult to trust everything we hear…no matter how terrifying they might be. ———————— Lore Resources:  Episode Music: lorepodcast.com/music  Episode Sources: lorepodcast.com/sources  All the shows from Grim & Mild: www.grimandmild.com Access premium content!: https://www.lorepodcast.com/support To advertise on our podcast, please reach out to [e-mail], or visit our listing here.

His name was John, or at least that's what the legend says. There are a lot of versions of the story, after all. Some say that the figure appeared to the people of Tana through a drug-induced dream. Tana, by the way, is an island in the archipelago of Vanuatu over in the South Pacific. Others say he was a real visitor. Either way, they agree on the important details. John was a white man who arrived on their tiny island dressed in military clothing with the promise of goods like food, technology, and even houses.

Within a decade, the people had left their lives behind and retreated into the deeper parts of the island to build more and more traditions about this mysterious individual. Oh, and his full name was John From, as in John From America. During the military activity of World War II, 50,000 American troops ended up being stationed on the islands there, giving life to the legends. The islanders watched as food and supplies literally rained down on them from above, thanks to the American airdrop operations, of course. The folks of Tana leaned into this folklore so deeply that after the troops were gone,

they built their own airstrips and control towers, believing they would lure John From back. And every year, they gathered to celebrate his story, many of them dressed in American military uniforms. There are a lot of deeper concepts that could be discussed in relation to the tradition of John From, but the thing I want us all to notice is right on the surface. It took just a couple of generations for an entire community to buy into a whole new piece of folklore.

And it makes you wonder, if something new can be that influential, how much more so would a tradition that's thousands of years older and much more terrifying? I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore. Pick a civilization, and they're bound to have something in their religion or culture that fits our notion of a demon. You can go back pretty far into the past while doing so. For example, ancient Samarians, who existed over 6,000 years ago, believed in a spirit known as Gid-dim, literally translated the name means approaching darkness, and it was

thought to be a spirit of illness, both physical and mental. Scholars have even uncovered ritual prayers that were designed to ask other deities for protection from Gid-dim, but of course, not all people were planning for the future. Some it seems were dealing with those dark forces already, and in those cases they sought out the help of the Ashipu, a sort of hybrid between a physician and a priest, and what they performed was a ritual that would, at least by name, sound familiar to most of us. An exorcism. In Egypt there are similar concepts.

Interestingly, ancient Egyptian ideas about demons break them down into two different categories. There are guardians who are evil spirits tied to a specific location, and then there are wanderers who, as their name clearly explains, can travel anywhere they want. There were demons associated with illness, like Shea Akech, who was responsible for headaches, and Nisjet, who caused injury to the body. They even believed that nightmares were caused by demons, who entered the house at night to torment the people inside.

The ancient Hebrews had their own elaborate system of angels and demons, much of which was passed down to the early Christians, and right there in the middle of those stories of demonic possession were examples of exorcism. They went hand in hand for the most part, no matter where you look. In West Africa, the Hausa and Magozawa people have a word for those who are possessed. They call them the Bori, and interestingly enough, they use it in two situations, when someone appears to be possessed by a demon, and when someone is accused of witchcraft. The implication is that witches are just people possessed by evil spirits, who are the true

source of their power. And exorcism for them is a simple matter of speaking the word iron at them, saying it three times is supposed to be enough to drive the spirit away, a sort of anti-beetlejuice, without Michael Keaton, of course. And on and on throughout the centuries, culture after culture has followed suit. Each one has built a belief system that involved demons and their ability to possess human beings. And of course, other terms or explanations were proposed in the face of possessed individuals.

Evil illness, mass hysteria, cries for attention, even ventriloquism. All of them were proposed to rationalize behavior that didn't fit the norm. But no matter what they called it, or how they tried to explain the odd behavior, cultures everywhere have demonstrated a belief that something supernatural is going on behind the scenes, that we humans are vulnerable pawns in a larger game. And if we're not careful, we might become hosts to something evil. And for a brief window in English history, that belief found itself without tools, without options, and without hope.

And if they're true, the stories from that period are otherworldly. So, a brief history lesson. For centuries, the driving force behind Christianity was the Catholic Church. Their monks and priests traveled the known world and carried their faith with them, building communities and churches. And they followed the leadership of their bishops and, of course, the Pope. In 1517, though, a group of Christians broke off from the Catholic Church in protest of some beliefs and practices that they felt were not biblical.

They wanted to use this protest to reform the Church. Today it's a movement known as the Protestant Reformation, with its purpose hidden right there in the name. King Henry VIII essentially kicked the Catholic Church out of the country and replaced it with the state-run English version, the Anglican Church. And in a lot of superficial ways, these two branches of the Church look similar. Priests in white garments, high liturgy, even their churches as buildings look the same. And for some Protestants that was seen as too risky, they wanted the differences to be more

drastic, more paired back, more pure. And so a lot of people called these extremists puritans, although they refer to themselves simply as the godly. And yes, these are the same people we imagine with tall black hats with buckles in the middle, usually in the context of the Mayflower and Thanksgiving. But it all started in England. So that's the stage. We have three factions of the Church, the boogeyman specter of the old Catholicism, the new Protestant

version known as Anglicanism, and the extremists that people called puritans. And by the time Queen Elizabeth I was on the throne, tensions were pretty high. And thumping along quietly behind all of this, like a heartbeat, was the never-ending belief in the supernatural, and specifically belief in demon possession. It was a tradition that dated back all the way to the early Celtic people long before the arrival of Christianity there. And it wasn't going away. In fact, through the 1500s, it was growing at an unusual rate, thanks to the witchcraft

panic that many communities were dealing with. The trouble was, without the Catholic Church, people no longer had specific tools available to them, like exorcism. Yes, the Anglican Church had provisions for it, but they were much more regulated and rare. So every day English people were stuck. They believed that demons were real and dangerous, but they had no way to fight back. Enter John Darrell.

He was the poor son of a large family from Mansfield, probably born sometime around 1562, but that's just a guess. What we do know is that he was a Puritan and a go-getter, because his family had no money to put him through school at Cambridge, so he worked the whole time to pay his own bills. By 1586, at the age of 24, he had already graduated, married, and had five children under his roof. And he had some ideas about demon possession bouncing around as well. So when another Puritan minister came knocking for help, John Darrell was ready. It seems there was a young woman named Catherine Wright who needed their help.

She had started to act bizarrely after a beating by her stepfather, and things had been getting progressively worse. Darrell met with her and declared that she was, in fact, possessed by an evil spirit, and his solution would have made any Puritan happy. Dispossession by prayer and fasting. And it worked. But there was one other outcome. A woman was accused of being the witch who afflicted young Catherine, and her case was

taken to a local magistrate, who dismissed it as an unsubstantiated lie, and he threatened John Darrell with time in prison. Needless to say, John never performed an exorcism again. When that magistrate died in 1595, though, John felt like he had a new lease on life. And over the next two years, he started rebuilding his reputation as the man to see if you wanted a Puritan exorcism. First there was the case of Thomas Darling, a 13-year-old boy who was determined to be possessed after medical treatment failed to help him recover.

The boy himself blamed a local woman for bewitching him by farting in his presence. Then after his successful exorcism, that woman was arrested. Which stinks, I know. After that, there were the Lancashire Seven, a group of individuals under the roof of a man named Nicholas Starkey. Some were his own kids, and others were wards under his care. But all of them were experiencing strange fits, and John Darrell showed up as requested and declared them all to be possessed.

And what does one do when there are so many possessed children to care for at once? Put on a show, of course. John brought along a helper named George Moore, and together the two men gathered all of the children as well as family and neighbors inside the house for an all-day marathon of sermons, prayer, and singing, all while the kids rived and screamed on the floor behind them. Like Dust Bowl Big Tent Revivalist preachers only dressed up in Elizabethan garb. And of course, it was a successful event. The children were healed, demons were cast out, and their household was restored to order.

John Darrell, exorcist for hire, was finally hitting his stride. But not everything, it seems, was on the up and up. I would like to say that business was good, but there is no record that John Darrell charged for these services. Still, the late 16th century version of Yelp was bringing him all sorts of interested families, looking for a solution to the troubles that plagued them. In 1597, Darrell was called to help with a 14-year-old boy named William Summers. He worked as the servant in the household of an artist and was reportedly beaten and

abused constantly. Understandably, he acted out against authority, and maybe he pretended to have fits to avoid future beatings. The definitive proof of his demonic possession, though? Apparently, young William liked to edit the Lord's Prayer, saying, lead us into temptation rather than lead us not. It was teenage fun, labeled as heresy by Puritan adults, and John Darrell saw it as proof the boy was troubled by a demon.

This time, Darrell brought along three ministers, and together they gathered over 150 people to watch their all-day string of sermons and songs together with prayer and fasting. And wouldn't you know it? It worked. William Summers walked away healed and well. It was so successful and amazing that words spread far and wide, eventually reaching the archbishop of Canterbury himself. John Darrell was arrested and put on trial, eventually being thrown into prison.

Eighteen months later, in May of 1599, he was put on trial again, and the courts offered him a deal, agreed to stop performing exorcisms by prayer and fasting, and you can go free. Darrell refused, and somehow a short while later he was quietly set free anyway. Immediately, he picked back up where he left off, which didn't sit well with the Anglican authorities, including one man, the chaplain to the Bishop of London, Samuel Harstett. What followed was a very public war of words. Think of it as the Elizabethan equivalent of dragging each other on social media, only using the printing press instead of the internet.

Harstett published a brutal thrashing of John Darrell, accusing him of setting all his exorcisms up ahead of time. In fact, in all but one instance, he had met with the families first before returning to put on his show. The deception was clear. Harstett's pamphlet, by the way, had a monster of a title. A discovery of the fraudulent practices of John Darrell, Bachelor of Arts, in his proceedings concerning the pretend possessions and dispositions of William Summers of Nottingham, Thomas Darling,

the boy at Caldwell, and Catherine Wright at Mansfield, and of his dealings with one Mary Coop of Nottingham, detecting in some sort the deceitful trade in these latter days of casting out demons. Yeah, that's the title. And I think I'm willing to break the rules and judge this book by its cover, you know? John Darrell shot back from a secret location, publishing his own pamphlet that claimed he was the target of a smear campaign by the Anglican church who felt threatened by his power as a Puritan exorcist.

And maybe there was some truth to that, but the evidence was already out there. However much he might have believed he was doing God's work, the truth was clear. Everything he had done to date had been a lie. He found homes were abuse, both verbal and physical, were driving children and teens to desperate behavior, and used religion to give those guilty parents something else to blame. After the dust settled, John Darrell seems to have disappeared from the social and religious radar of his day.

We know he returned to Mansfield, but what he did for the next decade or more is a bit of a mystery. Maybe he stopped altogether, or maybe he kept going under an assumed name. Oh, and remember Thomas Darling, that 13-year-old boy who wanted us to believe that a witch had cursed him by farting near him? He eventually went off to study at Oxford, but never really outgrew his immature behavior. In 1603 he was brought before judges at the Palace of Westminster, a place known as the Star Chamber, and accused of libel against Oxford's vice-chancellor.

His punishment, a beating, and the removal of his ears. There's something attractive about exorcism stories. It's a forbidden fruit for sure, but there's never not been a fascination about it, if you were honest. I'm of a generation that remembers how certain cable channels would scramble their picture, but not the sound, unless you paid for it. You couldn't see them, but you could certainly hear them, and the sounds were frustratingly tempting.

And so it's no surprise that I remember the night of one particular sleepover at a friend's house when I finally saw the exorcist. Seeing the head of a little girl spin 360 degrees around on her shoulders, however far-fetched and fantastical it might seem, left a deep impression on my young mind. And looking back decades later, it's easy to understand why. However primitive these special effects might have been, they made it clear to my young mind that I never wanted to be possessed, which I suppose is where much of the horror came from.

But just like any other topic of discussion or popular tradition, there's a nuance to the conversations about possession stories. And more than that, there's power in the details, in the personal stories, and the players who are wrapped up in them. People like John Darrell. The last we hear from him is in 1617, twenty years after that final public exorcism of William Summers. That was when he published a book that demonstrated how the years and struggling had changed him.

The fire was gone, and all he wanted to ask for now was cooperation between religious factions. But his public rise and fall as a Puritan exorcist wouldn't entirely fade away. In fact, as those events played out in the last few years of the 16th century, their reports spread far and wide. And it's hard to put that sort of genie back in its bottle. People remembered. Honestly, how could they not?

In 1601, a writer sat down to create a bit of entertainment. But as is so often the case, they drew upon current events and popular ideas. In his story, we watch a character's erratic behavior get blamed on demonic possession by his enemies. And then he's put through a fake and fraudulent exorcism by a fool dressed up as a priest. Clearly, John Darrell's fingerprints are all over the story, little bits of influence that are visible if you know where to look. And in a sensory sense, critics have considered it to be a classic.

The work? It was a play called Twelfth Night. By none other than William Shakespeare. Stories of demon possession and the lengths people have gone to escape them are scattered throughout history. Today's journey was a tour through just one example, but there are so many others. In fact, there's one more I want to share with you. And if you stick around through this brief sponsor break, I'll tell you all about it.

In the late 18th century, the English city of Bristol became the location for two very public topics of discussion. First, the slave trade. Bristol had long held a key role in the transatlantic slave trade, and a number of religious groups were up in arms about it trying to put a stop to it. That included the Society of Friends, otherwise known as the Quakers, and followers of a guy named John Wesley, the leader of a movement called the Methodists. But these religious groups had one other obsession at the time, demonic possession.

In fact, Methodist meetings played such frequent hosts to these sorts of outbursts and demonstrations that news of them spread far and wide throughout the region. And over time, the people in and around Bristol became really good at spotting someone who was clearly demon-possessed. Simply put, a bunch of people started believing they were experts in a topic that they'd only read about in the newspapers. And that's rarely a good way to begin a story. George Lukens was born sometime around 1743.

He hailed from the nearby village of Yetten, but he bounced around the area between work as a tailor, a carrier, and a mummer, a sort of actor whose performance has a lot of similarities to mimes. And life seemed to be going pretty well for George Lukens. That is, until the winter of 1769. One night that winter, George was said to have gotten blindingly drunk at a local pub when something inside of him snapped. He howled at the moon like an animal, danced on burning coals, he ran around all over and

jumped onto and over things. And while he sobered up the following morning, these odd fits didn't go away. After six years of dealing with this condition, it finally prevented him from working as a tailor and he was checked into a local hospital. After several months there, though, they declared him to be incurable and sent him home to rest and recover there. But that only reinforced George's theory about his own condition. He wasn't sick, he was possessed by a demon, seven actually, and if seven ministers would

come and pray with him, he might be healed. Within a year, his story had caught the attention of a minister named John Easterbrook, one of the most prominent religious figures in Bristol. And Easterbrook sent a message to Lukens, come to Bristol and I will gather other ministers to help pray for you. And the date was set for June 13th of 1778, Friday the 13th. When Easterbrook met Lukens in the vestry of his church that day, he had expected an intimate gathering.

But someone had spread the word about what was going to happen, and seeing as how the entire community was obsessed with stories of demonic possession, a massive crowd showed up to watch. Easterbrook wrote about the experience later. They began singing a hymn, he said, on which the man was immediately thrown into strange agitations. His face was variously distorted and his whole body strongly convulsed. His right hand and arm then began to shake with violence, and after some violent throes,

he spake in a deep, hoarse, hollow voice, personating an invisible agent, calling the man to an account and upbraiding him as a tool for bringing that silly company together. Said it was to no purpose and swore by his infernal den that he would never quit his hold of him, but would torment him a thousand times worse for making this vain attempt. Two hours later, though, Easterbrook had won. With one final seizure and monstrous howl, Lukens fell silent and still. The demon was gone. When the account was published in the city newspaper, it spread far and wide, and readers

ate it up. But there were also a lot of people who saw it and scratched their heads. Had the Reverend Easterbrook never heard of Lukens before? The biggest most vocal critic of all was a physician from Lukens' own home village who said it wasn't a demon and it wasn't even something medical. Lukens was an impostor, plain and simple, and the proof had been hiding rights under their noses. Before achieving fame as a possessed man, Lukens had been an actor known for two things,

his physical skills and ventriloquism. This episode of Lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with research by Megan DeRosh 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 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 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 these 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.