Lore - Episode 201: Inescapable

Episode Date: June 20, 2022

You can’t beat an old classic. And in the world of folklore, there are few types of stories more classic that the good old fashioned ghost story. So today, we take a tour through some of the most chilling and thrilling of the bunch. Lore Resources:  Episode Music: lorepodcast.com/music  Episode Sources: lorepodcast.com/sources  All the shows from Grim & Mild: www.grimandmild.com ©2022 Aaron Mahnke. All rights reserved. Access premium content!: https://www.lorepodcast.com/support To advertise on our podcast, please reach out to [e-mail], or visit our listing here.

When I was a kid, Coca-Cola did something unexpected. They were worried about competition from their big rival Pepsi, so they did some tests. After looking at the results, they took the recipe of roughly 100 years and tossed it out the window. Got with the old in with the new, as they say, right? In fact, they literally called it New Coke, and it was a complete failure. Within three months, they brought back the old recipe under the reassuring label of Coca-Cola Classic, hoping to calm all that fear and panic that threatened to ruin them.

Yes, they kept trying to sell the new version for another five years, but they eventually called it quits, because most of the time, you can't beat an old classic. For example, is the Clash of the Titans film from a decade ago packed with visual, spectacle, and great action? Absolutely. But it doesn't hold a candle to the 1981 original, despite all that glitz and glamour. The same could be said for cars, or music, or just about anything else. Pick a field, or genre, or medium, and there's a list of classics.

They stand as examples that define their category, or hold on as perennial favorites. Even within the world of folklore, it's more of the same. And in the world of folklore, few types of stories are considered classic than one genre in particular. Is it ancient? Yes. Is it entertaining? You better believe it.

But it also tends to be utterly terrifying. Because even all these centuries later, it's hard to beat a good old-fashioned ghost story. I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore. We begin today with a story from Devon, a county down in the southwest corner of England. That's where a young man named Francis Fry worked as a servant in the home of a guy named Philip Furs. One day in November of 1682, Fry was toiling away in the fields when a spirit of an old man appeared to him.

He told Fry that he was the dead father of his boss, Mr. Furs, and that his son had mishandled the distributing of his inheritance. So he wanted Fry to help make it right. Now the story doesn't tell us how Fry got his hands on the money. I assume it was stored in a chest in his boss's house and he sort of let himself in and took it. Then, following the ghost's instructions, he visited each of the people who would have received an inheritance and handed over what they were owed.

And all of them, as you might imagine, were grateful. Well, all but one. It seems that the dead man's own sister was a bit suspicious and she refused the payment. She probably assumed that Fry had done some deal with the devil, and this being the 1680s, she was most likely very aware of the dangers of getting involved in something like that. So Fry used her money to buy a fancy ring and offered her that instead. Thankfully, she accepted. But the trouble wasn't over, because the dead old man Furs might have been happy now,

but his equally dead wife wasn't. She was upset that her dead husband had been so generous and set about haunting just about every aspect of poor Francis Fry's life. A lot happened after that, honestly too much to describe here, but I'll give you a short list to give you an idea. The dead man's dead widow took the form of a giant dog that belched fire, as well as a horse that appeared inside the house before jumping through the window. Objects moved in the kitchen, too, and an entire slab of bacon was reported to have

cooked itself. Although if I had to pick a poltergeist to live in my house, one that randomly cooked bacon would be first on my list. Oh, and a few months after all of this began, around Easter of 1683, Fry himself was caught up by the ghost, carried far above the house, and then dumped unceremoniously into the neighboring swamp. Nearby in Cornwall, there's another ghost story that's been around for centuries, and it's remained one of the most popular in the region.

But before I dive into it, a word of warning, there's a lot to this story that's nothing more than outright fantasy. My guess is that a lot of those bits are what make it so popular. But I'm going to focus today on just the first half, because it's ever so creepy. Is it any more believable? Well, I'll let you be the judge of that. Jan Tragegel was a Cornish magistrate and lawyer in the early 1600s who had a bit of a nasty reputation.

He fit that stereotypical bad guy mold pretty well, being powerful, rich, cranky, and dishonest. There were all sorts of rumors about him, too. He had killed his sister, they said. Or was it his wife? Well, maybe it was both, because, honestly, Jan Tragegel was a bad guy. And the source of all that power and wealth, he had sold his soul to the devil, of course. But ever the dishonest, tricky one, Jan Tragegel found a way to get out of that bargain, too. Toward the end of his life, he paid the local church a good sum of money to ensure that he

would be buried on consecrated church property and that they would perform an exorcism over his body before filling in the hole. And all of that went according to plan. Jan died, he got his post-mortem exorcism, and then his churchyard grave was covered up. Case closed. End of story. Right?

Well, sort of. You see, a while after his death, a court case was brought before one of the local magistrates. It was essentially an argument between two families over ownership of a parcel of land. Basically, one of the families had purchased land from the other without their knowing it. And the guy who sold it to them? Jan Tragegel, of course. Witnesses were heard on both sides, and blame was cast back and forth.

But in the end, the case was decided in favor of the family who had had their land taken from them. And how did they find their star witness? They resurrected the corpse of Jan Tragegel. The rest of the ghostly legend centers around what to do with the man after the trial was over. Apparently, the resurrection made it impossible to put him back in the churchyard. So the local priests came up with a series of impossible tasks to keep the dead man busy.

It was like emptying a bottomless pond with a tiny shell, or sweeping all the sand off a beach. You get the idea. Rumor has it that today, Jan Tragegel is still toiling away down there at Land's End. The headland on the Penwith Peninsula, mind you, not the retail store. And I suppose, in that way, his story is never really over. But if you can't get enough of these classic pre-modern ghost tales, then I have a treat for you.

Because we are just getting started. This next one is a complicated story, and I'll do my best to reduce the number of names and players just to make it easier to follow along. But the journey is worth it, trust me, because this is a perfect example of a classic 18th century ghost story. It begins in the late 1750s, in the village of Stokeferry on the eastern coast of England in Norfolk. That's where William and Elizabeth Kent lived, along with Elizabeth's sister Fanny.

You see, the couple was expecting their first child, and so Elizabeth's sister had come to stay and help out with all the chaos that would follow. But that chaos took on a darker mood when Elizabeth died in childbirth. William was thankful for his sister-in-law's help caring for his newborn son, though, and they did their best. But two more things happened that altered their trajectory in life. Two months after the birth, the baby also passed away. And William and Fanny transitioned from friends to lovers.

The trouble was, English law at the time prohibited William from marrying his dead wife's sister, so he sold his roadside inn for a good sum of money, quit his job at the post office, and moved himself and his lover south to London. It was that age-old escape plan that worked so much better in the days before the internet. Pack up and start a new somewhere else. And it worked. They settled into a room in a house on Cock Lane, which they rented from a guy named Richard Parsons, and then they got on with their life.

Although they weren't married, William and Fanny refer to themselves illegally, mind you, as Mr. and Mrs. Kent, and soon after that, Fanny discovered that she was pregnant. Oh, and just for added context, upon moving into this rental space, the landlord noticed that William had quite a lot of money and asked to borrow a small sum from his new tenant, maybe $150 by today's standards. That'll be important later, trust me. One day in 1760, William had to go out of town on business, so the landlord's 11-year-old daughter, Elizabeth Parsons, came to stay and help Fanny out around the house.

But that's when things went sideways. Because that Sunday, the house was filled with the noise of mysterious tapping and scratching sounds. And Fanny's first thought? Her dead sister had finally tracked her down and was going to torment her for stealing her husband. Others believe the noises were an omen, hinting at some impending tragedy caused by their life of sin.

Whatever they believed, when William returned home and experienced the noises for himself, he quickly packed them up and moved them out to a different nearby house. The noises stopped when they moved, but other problems began. You see, before their baby could be born, William watched as Fanny became sick with smallpox and quickly passed away. Then he learned that he was owed an inheritance from her family, which he fully spent on her burial. But it turns out some of that money was meant for her brother, so that brother sued him.

William knew where he could get the money though, because his old landlord Richard Parsons had yet to repay him. So William went after him in court, and by 1762, everything was settled and life returned to normal. Except it didn't. What actually happened was that the noises in the house returned. Of course, William didn't live there anymore, so it shouldn't have really been a problem for him.

Like that Parsons' daughter Elizabeth, now 13, claimed that she could communicate with the ghost responsible, and it had a message. William Kent, it said, had killed Fanny with poison. It was classic ghost story material, too. Elizabeth created a system for the ghost, who would knock once for yes and twice for no, and all sorts of questions were asked of it. The trouble was, most of the answers were wrong. Despite Elizabeth's claim that the ghost was the spirit of Fanny herself, that spirit

got her own father's name wrong, among many other questions. But that one intriguing idea, the idea that William had poisoned Fanny, captured everyone's imagination. What followed was a battle of evidence. The apothecary who had attended Fanny prior to her death made it clear that she had indeed died of smallpox. But at the same time, young Elizabeth Parsons began to ramp up her interactions with the ghost.

It all came down to which party people were willing to believe. Elizabeth's ghost, however, began to draw attention, and with that came suspicion. Everyone from locals to nobles were visiting the house to hear the spirit knock, and people started to notice that Elizabeth was always in the room when these things happened. So they tested her, and she failed. The ghost, it turns out, was nothing more than a clever trick. And more than that, it was the visible tip of a larger plot by the girl's father, Richard Parsons, to damage William's reputation and take the focus off of his own failure to honor

that old loan. In the end, the plans backfired on them. Richard would spend the next two years of his life in Newgate prison as punishment for his fraud, although, thanks to her young age, Elizabeth got off with only a warning. And the ghost? Well, it never made an appearance again. But there are always more ghost stories, and there are always more chills. And thankfully, I have another one up my sleeve.

For this one, though, we need to travel across the Channel to France, which in the grand scheme of things is a mere stone's throw away. There are a lot of differences between England and France, and a lot of similarities, too. And one thing they shared in common was the struggle between the old Catholic branch of Christianity and the newer Protestant one. In England, that played out mostly as a battle between Catholic and Anglican forces, but in France, the conflict had different names. There, they called them Huguenots, a term used for Calvinist Christians, and for a long

time those Huguenots were violently persecuted, although neither side was innocent. Huguenots were guilty of destroying Catholic relics and buildings and even murdering priests, and the Catholics returned blood for blood. In 1572, for example, a bunch of French Huguenots gathered in Paris and the surrounding area to celebrate the marriage of a king's sister to a Protestant ruler known as Henry of Navarre. Catholics killed upwards of 20,000 Huguenots that day alone. So when I tell you that François Perot was a Huguenot minister who chose to move from Switzerland to France in 1611, I hope you can feel the baggage that comes with that.

Perot settled in the town of Mecan in eastern France, along with his wife and a couple of household servants. But about a year after their arrival, something happened that would prevent them from ever having peace in that house. On September 14th of 1612, François was out of town for a few days, only to return to a house in chaos. It seems that a spirit had begun to attack the people in the house, and it all began in the bedroom.

Out of the nights he was gone, François's wife Anne claimed that something or someone entered her bedroom and violently pulled the curtain off the bed. She and the servant girl searched everywhere for an intruder, but couldn't find one. When they tried to search the kitchen, though, the door wouldn't open. So after calling another of the servants, a teenage boy, to help them, they managed to get inside, only to find that the kitchen had been thrown into disarray with pots and pans all over the floor. François assumed it was all a prank, but the first night he was back home, he too experienced

the weird events. The kitchen was filled with the sound of falling pots, that loud metal-on-stone noise that couldn't be ignored. But when he entered the kitchen to catch the culprit, the room was empty. Now, being a good minister, François took the issue to his church elders, who volunteered to stay up through the nights in his kitchen to watch for the real person behind it all. After a few nights of observation, though, all they heard was a voice that took credit for the mess, and it claimed to know a few secrets, if they were willing to listen.

This ghostly voice claimed to be privy to gossip about others in town that no one else knew, and as you can imagine, that was a pretty attractive offer. Word spread, and people from all over traveled to listen to the voice come from François's house, Catholic and Protestant alike. But through it all, François himself was still convinced it was a prank, because, well, things like this almost always are. After the spirit tormented their maid servant to the point that she quit and left their house, François had had enough.

The spirit changed tones after that, begging for help in drafting a will. Then it asked for help traveling safely to another village, and then it claimed to know the location of a buried treasure on their property. Through it all, though, François refused to play along. It was a prank, after all. In response, the spirit claimed that it knew when François would die, and the minister told the voice to just take a hike and not come back. And for about a month, there was peace.

When the unseen pest returned, it was more violent. According to François, writing about it a few months later, the invisible force began to throw stones at his house, off and on for nearly two weeks straight. Many were small, but a good number of the stones weighed close to two or three pounds apiece, and sometimes the stones were aimed outward, too. In one account, a local notary named Mr. Tornus was passing by Perot's home when he decided to whistle at the house to see if the devil still lived there. In response, a stone flew out of nowhere and struck him.

Intrigued and confused, he picked the rock up and marked it with a bit of charcoal and then tossed it back the way it had come. When another stone flew toward him a moment later, the mark on it confirmed it was the same one as before, only this time it was, according to him, as hot as the fires of hell. No source for the voice or the stone throwing was ever found. Of course, there were theories. François held to the conviction that it was a prank, driven by some Catholic's desire to persecute his Huguenot household.

But others suspected a curse, due to the fact that the previous resident of the house had been forcibly evicted. They believed that her curse had brought all this trouble upon the Perot's. But again, it was nothing more than a theory. And in the end, that's all a ghost story is, isn't it? A way to explain the unexplainable, with a dash of entertainment and terror thrown in. The impossible suddenly becomes real, and the worst nightmares of those involved take on a living, breathing persona, right before their eyes.

In the case of François Perot, we get to see that old schoolyard rhyme play out as true. Sticks and stones might break their bones, but words could never hurt them. There never seems to be a lack of ghost stories. From campground, fire pit gatherings, and Halloween parties, to the stories told to newcomers by older folks in town, there seems to be no end to their usefulness and flexibility. As we've learned here in the past, tales of restless spirits go back thousands of years, and they've continued right up to today. I live pretty close to Salem, Massachusetts, and it's common to see homes for sale in

the area with a little disclaimer on the sign, not haunted. Which begs the question, does that mean that there are some that are? It's hard to find a culture or location that doesn't have a few ghost stories embedded in the fabric of society, and they sometimes influence a bigger audience than you might imagine. That story of young Elizabeth Parsons pretending to communicate with a knocking ghost, it was still being passed around a century later. We know this, because Charles Dickens mentions it in three of his novels.

And that concept, that there's really no escaping a good ghost story, feels appropriate, since so many of the stories involve an invisible pest that's difficult to get rid of, and there's no better example of that than Francois Perrault's Troublesome Ghost in France. Those disturbances he experienced continued, even after the stone throwing began, the objects kept moving and the voice kept shouting. And then one day, almost three months after it had all begun, one of Francois' neighbors was passing by the house and saw something extraordinary, a large snake slithered its way out the front door and into the yard.

Of course the neighbor captured it, and of course the snake was paraded all around town as proof that the devil, often depicted as a serpent, had really been inside Perrault's home, and of course, and sadly, they killed it, because they blamed it for everything that had happened. It shouldn't have made a difference if Perrault was right, killing the snake wouldn't have put an end to things if it was all just a prank. But surprisingly, that's not what happened, because once the townsfolk killed it, all those disturbances immediately went away.

One thing that makes good ol' fashion ghost stories so popular is that there never seems to be a shortage of them. I hope our brief tour today, through a few of my favorites, was as thrilling for you to hear as it was for me to share. But of course, I'm not done, I've tracked down one more fantastic tale, and if you stick around through this brief sponsor break, I'll tell you all about it. Welcome to Les Jardins Condos by Jayman Built, a community inspired by Parisian architecture with two acres of lush central gardens, live in a one or two bedroom condo offering high

and finishings, professionally curated color palettes, smart home technology, and air conditioning. Enjoy our state-of-the-art fitness center, stroll along the Beau River, or visit the shops and restaurants of nearby Quarry Park. Now selling from the 250s, visit Jayman.com slash Les Jardins. It's easy to forget the things haven't always been the way they are. When we tell ghost stories from centuries ago, we hear them all through the modern filters in our minds. You and I today understand so much more about the world we live in and how it works.

We can't help it. By the 1860s, though, people were starting to frame everything around them through the lens of science, rather than folklore and religion. Now, what you might expect in response to that was the demise of superstitious beliefs. But weirdly, that wasn't the case. Instead of dismissing the paranormal as laughable, people brought that scientific mindset into it. They studied unusual phenomena, they dissected odd experiences, and they recorded everything

they learned. Simply put, science didn't kill superstition. It opened it up for study. So when I tell you about the house on Pitville Circus Road in Cheltenham, just know that we know this story not because a few people whispered about it around town, but because it was documented by investigators who worked hard through the late 19th century to debunk your everyday run-of-the-mill ghost stories. The house was built in the early 1860s, and the very first people to buy it and move in

were the Swinho family. They say it was lovely, a nice two-story house with a useful cellar and a lot of room to grow a family. Idilic might even be the most appropriate word here. Henry Swinho was an attorney who had worked with the East India Company for a number of years. When he and his wife Elizabeth moved there from India, they named the house Garden Reach after a neighborhood in Kolkata.

But not long after arriving, trouble began. In 1866, Elizabeth died in childbirth, leaving Henry alone to care for their five children. He buried his wife in the churchyard and then buried his sorrows with the bottle. But in 1869, he remarried, this time to a woman named Imogen Hutchins, and she brought five children of her own. Needless to say, that house was full. And just a year into their marriage, Henry kicked Imogen out for, of all things, drinking too much.

They separated for two years, then reunited, only to separate again in 1875. Henry died a year later, and then Imogen herself passed away a year after that. In 1879, a new family moved into the house on Pitville Circus Road. That's when Captain Frederick Desparg moved in with his wife and children, and they soon discovered that the previous family might not have left. You know, despite dying and all. It was one of the captain's daughters, Rosina Clara, who documented her experiences for others to read.

And according to her, the first sighting of a ghost in the house was a powerful experience. It happened when she was climbing into bed one night, ready to blow out the little candle on her table, when she heard a sound at her door. Naturally, she assumed it was her mother, but when she opened it, no one was standing outside in the hall. So she picked up the candle and headed out to see if someone might be walking away. And that's when she saw the woman. Rosina described her clothing as an all-black, formal-style dress, and the figure was slowly

walking toward the stairs. So Rosina followed. When the woman in black descended to the first floor, Rosina followed after her. But just as she was about to close in on the mysterious figure, a candle in her fingers went out, leaving her in complete darkness. She held on to that story for two years before sharing it with anyone else. Finally, in 1884, she told the rest of her family about it. And that's when her unusual experience began to feel more real and more haunting.

You see, her sister Edith had also witnessed a woman in black moving through the house at night. She had been climbing the stairs to the second floor one night when a woman silently passed her heading down. And both of them, at different times, had witnessed the woman standing motionless in front of a window in the drawing room, staring out into the street. Over the next few months, Rosina would try to catch the ghost to prove it was just a prank.

She tied strings across the stairs, hoping to find them broken in the morning. But nothing ever happened. Years later, in true classic ghost story fashion, Rosina was presented with a stack of photographs of previous residents of the house, along with their relatives. And although there were no photos of Imogen's Swinho to see, Imogen's sister was in the bunch. And that was the woman Rosina pointed out. The woman didn't look exactly like her ghost, she said, but there was a family resemblance.

Over the years, the house took on a number of other uses, for a while it served as the location of a boy's prep school, and later as a training home for local nannies. And since the early 1970s, it's been residential apartments. But although the house's purpose and residents have changed over and over throughout the years, there's been one constant theme that seems to point directly toward the past. Every now and then, someone sees an unusual figure in the house. A woman, dressed all in black. This episode of Lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with research by Megan

DeRoche 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 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 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. When you do, say hi. I like it when people say hi. And as always, thanks for listening.