Lore - Episode 216: Tales of Wonder

Episode Date: December 5, 2022

Some of the most unusual stories in history have a connection to something many of us have living right inside our homes. But just because they’re familiar doesn’t mean they aren’t chilling. ———————— Sign up for The Epitaph, the official Lore newsletter, here: lorepodcast.com/newsletter ———————— Lore Resources:  Episode Music: lorepodcast.com/music  Episode Sources: lorepodcast.com/sources  All the shows from Grim & Mild: www.grimandmild.com Access premium content!   To advertise on our podcast, please reach out to [e-mail], or visit our listing here.

Hey folks, Aaron here. Just a super quick announcement before we dig into today's new episode. The world of social media has had me thinking for a while. A lot of you follow the show on places like Instagram and Twitter for news and updates, but not all of you. And while putting updates right into the podcast just like this is the best way to reach most of you, it's an interruption and I really try to avoid those whenever possible. So I've dreamed up another solution.

A good old-fashioned email newsletter. I call it the epitaph, but that's not really important. What is important is that it's an irregular newsletter for news and updates with no spam or bothersome pitches. Just the big stuff. Sent straight to your inbox. So if that sounds like something you want in on, just go to the lore website to sign up at lorepodcast.com slash newsletter.

That way, you'll never miss big news when it arrives. That's it. That's my plea. Go sign up today. And now on with the show. Paul was on a roll. About 15 years ago, he managed to pick the winner of four out of six of Germany's matches in the Euro 2008 championship.

And not too bad, all things considered. But for the two years that followed, he pretty much kept to himself. In 2010, though, soccer fans across the world gathered to bask in the glory that is the World Cup. Paul, being a resident of Germany, started up his predictions again. And this time he stunned the country, going eight for eight. He literally could not have done any better. But of course, this is the modern world.

When you've got someone out there predicting your loss in a professional sports competition, it's easy to let passion get the better of you. So when Paul picked Germany to beat Argentina in the quarterfinals, fans of Argentina sent him death threats. Oh, and one guy, a chef from Argentina, even posted a recipe on Facebook, should anyone want to cook Paul and eat him. Which sounds utterly unspeakable until you learn one key thing about Paul. He was an octopus.

Yes, right there from his home at the Sea Life Aquarium in Oberhausen, Germany, Paul made a number of predictions over the years by picking between the team's logos on clear boxes containing food, and he was just one more name on an ever-growing list of animals who have done the same over the years. Humans have always been enchanted by the creatures around us, and while we usually have them live with us as pets and companions, to some they are so much more. They are beings of magic, with one eye on their food dish, and another on the future. And their tails are absolutely fascinating.

I'm Aaron Menke, and this is Lore. To understand the story of the learned pig, we have to start with his owner. Samuel Bisset was a former shoemaker from Scotland who somehow managed to wind up in the animal business. During the 1770s, he was known to tour around with an entire troop of trained creatures, which provided entertainment for anyone willing to part with a bit of coin. What kind of animals? Well, let's see, there were the tightrope walking monkeys, a turtle that had been trained

to fetch things like a dog, and even a trio of kittens that had been taught to hit their paws on tiny dulcimers in order to make music. And if the history is true, some of them even meowed as they did it. Before you scoff, please understand that people were willing to pay for a glimpse of this. During a single one-week run of performances in London, this cat opera earned Samuel Bisset a whopping 1,000 pounds, worth roughly $200,000 today. But it was in 1782 that he found his next big star, a small black piglet. It took Samuel two whole years to train the pig, but when he was done, he had quite the

act on his hands. And people loved it, wearing a tiny red waistcoat the pig was able to do things like count figures and identify people by name. How did he do it? Well, Samuel would lay out a series of cards, each with their own letter or number on it, and the pig would just sort of point to each of them in order. For example, he could apparently look at a pocket watch of any person present and then replicate the time on the cards, or count the number of people in attendance.

It sounds great, but a few months later, Bisset took his animals to Dublin, where a local man attacked Samuel with a sword because he had failed to obtain permission from the city to perform there. He died a couple of weeks later from his injuries, and a man named John Nicholson bought the whole menagerie because, well, the show must go on, right? I can't begin to tell you how popular the learned pig was throughout Ireland, Scotland, and England. Writing a couple of decades later, poet Robert Southie claimed that the little pig was even

more popular than Sir Isaac Newton. But with popularity comes critics, and this being the late 18th century, some of that criticism claimed that the pig's powers came from the devil. Amazingly, though, there would be more learned pigs to follow, and while it's not central to the folklore of gifted animals, I need to mention that most of these pigs were named Toby. Why? Well, some historians think it's a play on the Shakespearean line, to be or not to

be. And the play it's from? Hamlet Now, let's say the original learned pig was psychic because of his training, but other animals throughout history have exhibited that skill without any help at all. Back in 1918, for example, there was Snuffer the Dog, a stray dog picked up by an American air squadron in France. Like a lot of pets, Snuffer loved to be in the cookhouse, hoping for scraps to be dropped,

but one day he demonstrated a different skill entirely. First he started acting skittish, and then he started howling like a wolf. Believing the dog just wanted to be let outside, they tried to do that, but Snuffer gently bit one of the men's hands and then tried leading him away. On a whim, the rest of the staff in the cookhouse followed along, stepping outside. A moment later, a German shell landed directly on the building. Snuffers, it seems, had saved their lives through a premonition. And then there was Toto.

No, not the dog from the Wizard of Oz. This Toto was a cat, owned by an elderly couple who lived in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius. One night in March of 1944, the couple was asleep in bed when Toto woke them up. Of course, they swatted the cat away and went back to sleep, but that only made matters worse. After the husband finally had to climb out of bed and chase the cat around the room trying to catch it, the man's wife sat up and stopped him. Nothing about Toto's behavior was unusual, and she felt the sudden urge to pack up and

get out of the house. So they did, right there in the middle of the night, taking everything they could carry to her sister's house nearby. Within an hour, Vesuvius erupted, and the flow of lava utterly destroyed their home. The notion of psychic animals is an intriguing one, a pet or creature gifted with the power to see into the future or to do unusual things. Unsurprisingly, history has featured a number of them. But a truly spectacular example comes to us from the Isle of Man, located between Ireland

and the west coast of England. It was there, in the fall of 1931, that normal everyday life took a sudden turn toward the weird and bizarre. And even now, decades later, people are still debating whether it was real or not. The Irvings lived on their farm there, a place they called Cashion's Gap, which was a couple of miles away from the rest of the community and up a steep hill. They were poor, isolated, and pretty much left out of the growth of the modern world with no electricity or telephone.

But for James and his wife, Margaret, and their 12-year-old daughter, Viri, it had to have been hard. For a while that year, the family claimed to have noticed a strange animal on their farmland, usually just out of sight. They said it had a small, long yellow body with a long tail and sort of resembled a weasel. But after a while, those sightings started to happen inside their house too. And then there were the noises. If you've ever lived in a house older than a couple of decades, you probably have experienced

those sounds yourself. Scratching and rustling, sometimes even growling, it was enough to keep the Irvings awake at night, but soon even that would change. The animal began to imitate sounds that came from inside the house. If someone dropped an object, for example, the animal would repeat the knocking sound from behind the wall. And it wasn't just noises, because apparently this creature started to mimic their speech a short time later.

And although its voice was higher than a human's, it was clear and understandable. What did it say? Well, it claimed to be just a clever mongoose of about 80 years old, despite the fact that mongoose only live about 6 to 10 years in the wild. It also claimed to be just a ghost, but also that it had hands and feet and the ability to turn anyone who looked upon it to stone. Oh, and his name, he claimed, was Jeff. Jeff the mongoose.

Now early on, Jeff only seemed to make noise and talk in Viri's room. Believing that their daughter was in danger, James and Margaret discussed moving her bed into their own room. But Jeff was listening and told them, I'll follow her wherever you move her. He also told them once, I could kill you all, but I won't. Charming, I know. But Jeff had his good traits too. He apparently left dead rabbits for the family to cook, and they would pay him for his efforts

with a bit of sausage or fruit. And as you might imagine, word about this unusual unseen creature began to spread out from their isolated farm at Cashion's Gap to the rest of the island and then beyond. And as people learned of Jeff, some of the more curious wanted to see him for themselves. Over the next couple of years, a number of investigations were conducted. The Irvings provided hair samples they claimed to be collected from Jeff and even produced clay casts of his teeth, claws and footprints. The Zoological Society, however, couldn't match the cast to any known animal, including

mongoose. Their opinion, all of the prints had been made with a stick. A number of investigators even showed up at the farm, but Jeff never showed himself to them. And while he was photographed, those photos are all blurry, and the creature in question is clearly either a stray cat or just a clump of grass that looks a bit animal-like. Ever since, people have pondered who or what was behind the activity blamed on Jeff. There are some who think he was real, and that everything should be believed without

an ounce of doubt. But those folks I gather are in the minority. The rest are skeptical and have a variety of theories about the truth behind the mongoose. Perhaps Jeff was just an invention by an isolated and lonely child. Viri was reputed to have quite a knack for ventriloquism, after all, although when confronted with this fact, she denied it, claiming if she had been that talented, she would have traveled the world getting rich on it. Others think the entire family suffered through a delusional episode, and still more believe

that Jeff was less an animal and more a poltergeist, haunting the family because his remains had been disturbed years before. If we take Jeff's own word for it, though, I can split the atom, I am the fifth dimension, I am the eighth wonder of the world. But he wasn't, it turns out, the most mysterious animal of his day. Claudia started to notice her horse was different almost from birth. The little brown foal had been born in 1925, and Claudia bottle-fed her personally, the pair spending a lot of time together.

But the biggest clues started showing up about a year later. Claudia noticed that if she was outside the house and merely thought about the horse, she would come trotting over to her as if she had used her voice, which led to the horse's name, Lady Wonder. Oh, and it also kicked off a bit of training. At first, Claudia just used wooden blocks, the sort that kids play with with letters and numbers on them, asking the horse a series of questions and then watching as the animal pointed to blocks to spell out her answer.

It was stunning, and Claudia wanted to take it further. The next step was a contraction that sort of resembled a giant typewriter. It was as big as a piano and had two rows of large buttons, each connected by a wire to a large card bearing a letter or number. Before Claudia asked Lady Wonder a question, the horse would lean down and literally type out her answer. I do need to mention that Lady Wonder's spelling wasn't that great, but having never attended school, who could blame her?

But whenever it was off, it was a phonetic mistake, swapping out a K for a C and things like that, which caused one newspaper reporter to refer to her as an alfalfa-beddical horse, which is next level dad-joe-cumor for sure. But Lady Wonder could do more than type. She could predict. Over the course of her life, it said that more than 150,000 people visited Claudia's farm to pay a dollar for a glimpse of their future. Most of her patrons were interested in things like the sex of their unborn baby, or just

having their names spelled out without ever having spoken them to the horse. But because of the farm's proximity to Washington, D.C., some of those visitors were also politicians who were tired of their palm readers back in the city. Lady Wonder was said to have predicted the stock market crash of 1929 and the election victories of President FDR, Truman, and Eisenhower. She even made the prediction in December of 1940 that America would enter World War II, which it did a year later. But Lady Wonder also helped bring closure to a number of missing person cases.

In December of 1952, for example, she told experts about the location of a missing Massachusetts boy, Danny Mattson. The police found his body exactly where she told him it would be, in the field and wild water pit. And later that same month, she did the same for another distraught family. It took a few weeks, but the body of her missing son was also located thanks to the horse's information. And these successes brought national attention to Lady Wonder, growing the number of people

who believed in her psychic powers, and also those who doubted her authenticity. John Skarn was a traveling magician in 1928, which meant that he was well-versed in all of the sleight-of-hand tricks that performers like himself used to trick people. And after visiting Lady Wonder on her farm, he left convinced that he had witnessed similar tricks from the horse's owner, Claudia, movements from the horse whip in her hand that could possibly have been signals that guided the horse's behavior. Claudia, of course, denied it. But despite the doubters, most people accepted Lady Wonder for what she was, an extraordinary

horse with a gift that defied logic. Regardless of whether that power was some psychic ability, or just the ability to recognize signs and type out words related to them, she was special. And her death in 1957 shocked many. It was a heart attack that ended her life at the age of 33, just three years of life more than she had predicted for herself. Human and doubter John Skarn publicly claimed that she must have died from embarrassment at being a fake, but most people mourned.

There were 25 people at her funeral, which was held at Pet Memorial Park in Virginia. Someone read aloud from a poem titled An Arab's Farewell to His Horse by Caroline Norton, and there were many a tearful eye in the crowd. And I can't help but wonder if some of them spent the day thinking about one of Lady Wonder's spelling tricks in particular. You see, back in 1952, a newspaper reporter had visited the farm and asked the horse a very special question. Would you, they asked, like to be human?

Lady Wonder had spelled out her answer. Y-E-S. Yes. Real or not, there's one thing we can all agree was accurate about that horse. She certainly lived up to her name. We humans have always had a connection to the animals around us. They helped us hunt and protected us long ago, and have stuck around ever since, becoming companions and even service animals for those of us who have a need.

But through it all, they've demonstrated a remarkable ability to adapt and learn new things. I honestly don't think it's surprising that animals like Toto the cat, the learned pig, or Lady Wonder have left indelible marks on the pages of history. Every now and then, it seems, an animal comes around that defies explanation. They bewilder us, entrance us, and leave us wondering where the boundaries really are between the possible and the impossible. And sure, we can sit down and debate the truth behind the claim that some of these animals

have been psychic. Honestly, we can say the same about humans who claim to be as well. But no amount of logic or arguing will erase the fact that there have always been believers, and there will always be doubters. John Skarn wasn't the only person to doubt the claims of Claudia Fonda about her Horus Lady Wonder. A couple of years after the magician visited her, another man, Jack Woodford, paid his own visit, and he had quite the experience.

Now, keep in mind, he showed up as a skeptic. In fact, he made many trips to the farm there over the years. After his first visit, he described her as the most loathsome looking horse I have ever seen. But the feelings were apparently mutual. Lady Wonder was said to have taken an instant dislike to Jack. Maybe it was her psychic power that tipped her off toward Jack's hatred of her, or perhaps he just behaved like a nasty person and the horse noticed.

Whatever the reason, the pair weren't a good match. Jack said it best himself. The woman was unfriendly. The horse hated me. I hated the horse. The surroundings were most uncongenial, and there was no place to sit. But on one visit, Lady Wonder mystified the skeptic. He asked the horse to guess what his name was, and without pause, she leaned over her

enormous typewriter and tapped out the correct answer, J-A-C-K. Of course, Jack assumed that he was being tricked, so he then asked her for another name. One few people would know, a nickname from his past, and so the horse went back to typing, J-O-S-H. Jack was stunned. Only his long-dead grandmother had ever called him Josh, and yet here, standing outside a run-down stable on a dirty farm, a horse had guessed correctly.

Many years later, Jack returned to the farm and brought along his daughter so she could meet the horse herself. Lady Wonder didn't care for the daughter either, it seems. But when she saw the pair approaching, she leaned over her contraption and typed out a greeting for them, nonetheless. J-O-S-H, Josh. Psychic animals might sound like a theory that you'd find on an episode of Ancient Aliens, or in some old Ripley's Believe It or Not cartoon, but the fact remains that history

is filled with examples of extraordinary pets. And for the undecided listeners out there, I hope our exploration today has given you something to chew on. But of course, we aren't finished. While Lady Wonder might have been special, she was far from unique. And if you stick around through this brief sponsor break, I'll tell you all about one more predictive pet. This episode of Lore was sponsored by BetterHelp.

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Jim was the smallest of his siblings when he was born in 1925. But what he lacked in size he made up for with his large, intense eyes. Unexpected for a child, sure. But even more so for a dog. Jim you see was a Llewellyn setter, all black and white with floppy ears. And yes, he was small, but he was also pretty stubborn and opinionated. And one story from his early days illustrates that perfectly. Sam Van Arsdale owned and trained a number of dogs.

Getting them ready for hunting required constant work, and so he was frequently outside with the dogs, barking commands at them and watching how they responded and obeyed. And all of them did, except for Jim. Instead of doing what he was told, Jim had a habit of just slinking off to a patch of shade and laying down for a nap. One day though, Sam took all of the dogs out for a hunt. The sun was high in the sky and the air was hot. And perhaps with a slight bit of sarcasm, Sam looked at Jim, his disobedient, shade-loving

rebel, and told the pup that he should just go find a hickory tree to rest beneath. Amazingly though, Jim did exactly that, finding the lone hickory nearby and curling up. Now I probably don't need to tell you that it's quite unique and unusual for a dog to be able to identify trees by name. I will freely admit that I can't even do that myself, at least not without the help from an app on my phone. But Jim proved to be the exception to the rule. Over time, Sam tested the dog out, and he identified even more, oak, walnut, and cedar

to be precise. After that, Sam branched out and started asking Jim to distinguish between colors he called out, or the make-and-model of nearby cars. And Jim, the wonder dog, handled it all without breaking a sweat. Pretty soon, Sam was asking harder questions. If someone is feeling unwell, he once asked the dog, who should they go see? To answer him, Jim would trot over to the local physician standing nearby and rub his nose on the man's pant leg.

Of course, talent like that is hard to keep a secret, right? Dogs in their corner of Missouri started to whisper, and those whispers grew, until finally people from all around started to pay Jim a visit, hoping for answers to all of their questions. Many, in an echo of lady wonder, simply came looking to know the sex of their unborn babies, but others asked about sports results. One person took all of the names of the horses competing in the Kentucky Derby that year, and wrote each one out on a slip of paper.

Even after spreading those slips on the ground, Jim, the wonder dog, was asked to tap the projected winner's name with his paw. And he was right, seven years in a row. There were skeptics, of course, because there will always be skeptics about this sort of thing. One investigator asked Jim to perform his usual tricks, but with owner Sam standing perfectly still so that no signals or cues could be given to the dog. Jim, however, passed with flying colors.

And that age-old assumption also reared its ugly head, despite it being the 20th century, with at least one man claiming the dog's powers were a cult in origin. And I get the desire to look for answers, believe me. I think all of us would prefer truth over fiction, especially in the face of unbelievable stories like these. But none of the theories explained how the dog could identify a walnut tree, but never learned to respond to simpler commands like sit and roll over. Jim the Wonder Dog passed away in 1937, and Sam was heartbroken over the loss.

What he wanted was to bury Jim in the family plot at Ridge Park Cemetery, but there was a rule against it. So instead, he tracked down the owner of the open field beside the cemetery and got permission to bury Jim as close as possible, right along the property line. Years later, Ridge Park Cemetery started to run out of room, which isn't that all on common, honestly, but they were able to expand by purchasing the field Jim was buried in. Which means that now, even in death, Jim and Sam will always be together. This episode of lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with research by Cassandra

De Alba and music by Chad Lawson. And of course, no animals were harmed in the making of this episode. 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. 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. Bye. Bye. Bye.