Lore - Episode 218: Notorious

Episode Date: January 2, 2023

Some of the darkest folklore in America is hidden right inside many of the place names that are dotted across the landscape—and one special location that defies the norm. Written and produced by Aaron Mahnke, with research by Cassandra de Alba and music by Chad Lawson. ———————— Lore Resources:  Episode Music: lorepodcast.com/music  Episode Sources: lorepodcast.com/sources  All the shows from Grim & Mild: www.grimandmild.com ©2023 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 most people see it, they aren't drawn to its most obvious features. You'd think they'd be amazed by how old it is, dating back to the early 1200s. After all, manuscripts from that date range are pretty rare. The fact that this handwritten copy of the Christian Bible is still around after 800 years should probably be a major selling point. Or maybe you would assume people would be attracted to the book's physical size. Think of the largest book in your house, maybe a gorgeous coffee table book or one of those big omnibus versions of your favorite comic book series, you know, the chunky ones.

Well, most of those big books would look tiny next to this thing because it measures roughly three feet tall by a foot and a half wide. Never mind that it's nearly nine inches thick, and those dimensions make it the largest illuminated medieval manuscript in existence. And yet even that isn't what draws people to look at it. No, the big attraction for visitors to the National Library of Sweden in Stockholm is the full-page illustration that's typically visible when it's laid open. Because there, filling the full span of one page is an illustration of Satan.

In fact, even though the manuscript size is where its name comes from, Codex Gigas, after all, just means giant book, its popular title comes from that hauntingly chilling image, the Devil's Bible. It's a massive artifact of a bygone age, when books had to be copied by hand one at a time rather than printed by the thousands every day. But it's also an example of one of our longest-running and most problematic habits. Wherever we find an object or location we've been told to be afraid of, it usually ends up with a devilish nickname.

I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore. The Devil is in the details, as they say, and when it comes to the various names for that old Lord of Darkness, we could all learn a thing or two by taking a moment to explore some of the most common names for the devil throughout history. Satan is one of the most popular ones, often treated as the devil's proper first name, but Satan is simply a Hebrew word that means adversary or enemy. Beelzebub has come in and out of popularity as well, but most people have no clue that it's also a Hebrew word, this time meaning the Lord of Flying or the Lord of Flies.

The devil as a word comes to us from the ancient Greek word diabolos, which means the slanderer or the deceiver, which is sort of interesting considering the stuff I need to tell you about next. Now, remember, all of these words and concepts were old long before America was founded. Heck, they were old before the first white Europeans set foot in North America. When they did arrive, though, those settlers brought a few things with them, supplies, plans for the future, sometimes their families and all their worldly goods, and a whole lot of fear.

Fear because the New World, as they called it, was a strange, dangerous place compared to the familiar and understood home they had left behind. But also fear because this strange New World already had hundreds of thousands of people living there, and those people had a belief system that didn't quite line up with the European version. You see, the problem mostly came down to the notion of good and evil. Yes, the native peoples of North America had a wide array of spiritual beliefs, but they didn't have a central devil figure that could be pointed at as the big bad guy.

For example, the Algonquin people have Manitou, a spirit that could protect them, but could also harm them. John Fire Lame-Dear, a Lakota holy man and storyteller, said it best a few decades ago, We have no devil in our beliefs. You people invented the devil, and as far as I am concerned, you can keep him. And this was all very confusing to Europeans who were used to the very cut and dried separation of good and evil. There was God, and there was the devil, so pick a team.

But the indigenous people weren't Christian, and their non-Christian belief system didn't have that same neat and tidy organization going on, which made the settlers feel uneasy. Here does things to the human mind, and for those white settlers in a strange, seemingly untamed wilderness, there was a lot to be afraid of. And one big, well-known example is the Salem witch trials. And I know what you're thinking. It was a local community who suffered through an isolated event, but that's actually incorrect. In the 1680s, folks from Salem headed north into what is today the state of Maine.

They were expanding outward from the center of the Boston area, pushing deeper into native American territory, and naturally those original inhabitants pushed back, burning and destroying those new communities. As a result, a lot of these defeated settlers limped back to Salem with their tails between their legs and told stories of how the devil had attacked them, which was like throwing gasoline on the fires of fear that already burned there. It's no wonder the community panic wound itself up into a fever pitch in 1691. As far as they were concerned, the devil was real and was hiding inside every shadow

in the wilderness around them. But the biggest outlet for that fear was in the way places were named. From the hills of California where Spanish missionaries tried to stamp their faith onto older cultures, to the forests of New England and beyond, European settlers everywhere were giving old native American places new names that hinted at their so-called heathen origins. Maybe you live near one of these spots. There's probably a Devil's Punch Bowl near a few of you, or a Devil's Lake. Heck folks in Pennsylvania have not one, but three locations named the Devil's Potato

Patch, and while those spots are named for the large boulders that fill the fields, other spots have earned their titles for more unexplainable reasons. Events that have occurred there, the border on the weird, the supernatural, and the demonic. If you live in the area around New Hartford, Connecticut and want to have some outdoor fun, chances are good you'll head over to Satan's Kingdom because of the tubing and the kayaking on the Farmington River, of course. The spot is actually quite beautiful, with a river cutting through rock and thick wooded areas and offering several rapids for the folks who enjoy that sort of thing.

But the legends behind the name are just as interesting. One story claims that the name came about because a farmer cursed the land for failing to produce anything but rocks. Another rumor, dating back at least as far as an 1873 newspaper article, blamed the name on the construction trouble that a railroad company had when they were building track through the area. But the most common legend says that the area called Satan's Kingdom earned that name because it was once home to a mixed community of native peoples and freed black folks who, according

to a 1928 Hartford Current article, were horse thieves, murderers, and gunmen of the worst type. But that, as you might have guessed, was a lie. One that was spread to slander a real interracial community over in Barkamstead Lighthouse who were peaceful and law-abiding but clearly different from the surrounding white community. Fear, in other words, was the real origin story. Not to be outdone, Massachusetts has its own Satan's Kingdom. There's however earned its name for a big forest fire that took place right after a

local minister was said to have preached about the fires and brimstone of hell. Oh, and Vermont has one too. There's is Satan's Kingdom simply because the ground is too stony to farm. Travel west and you'll bump into even more devilish places. Out in Wyoming there's Devil's Gate, which is a narrow canyon cut through a massive wall of limestone. How did it earn that name? Well the story was given to us by a guy named Matthew Field, a reporter from New Orleans

who was passing through Wyoming in 1843. According to him, a hunter in his traveling party told him it all started when a massive beast with long tusks was cornered there by the indigenous people of the area. Rather than go quietly, the creature was said to have rammed the limestone cliffs and gouged a passage through them, escaping the hunters. The trouble is, that story isn't even local. It's likely nothing more than a fabrication by Field himself. California has its own Devil's Gate.

This one is near Pasadena and is a gorge carved out by the Arroyo Seiko River. Clearly it didn't start out with that name, but in 1858 a guy named Judge B.S. Eaton passed through and said it reminded him of Devil's Gate in Wyoming and just used the same name there. Creative, I know. By the time the Arroyo Seiko was dammed in 1920 to prevent flooding in the area, the name was so ingrained in the culture there that they called the new construction Devil's Gate Dam.

And after that, more and more events seemed to feed into the moniker. A man-made tunnel in the nearby rock was named a portal to hell in the 1940s, and the disappearance of a number of children in the 1950s added to the place's demonic reputation. Some were actually connected to a serial killer named Mack Ray Edwards, but two of the missing children were never explained. As always, these things made locals feel a bit of fear, helping the name maintain its power. One last location in South Dakota on the northern edge of the town of Garrison is a place called

Devil's Gulch. Like a lot of others I've mentioned so far, this is a natural rock formation, this time an 18-foot-wide chasm that has been split through the rock by the creatively named Split Rock Creek. Like so many others, this location has a fabricated Native American legend attached to it that doesn't match up with any of the actual mythology of the local tribes. And there's an equally fake story about a party of white settlers who were passing through only to be set upon by a bloodthirsty Native tribe.

Both stories were invented to paint the local indigenous people in a negative light. And I don't point out things like that to be picky or draw some political line in the sand. I do it because we need to understand the reason for place names, not just the names themselves, because the reasons are where the folklore and the context are hidden, things that help us better understand the people who came before us. But the one that gets told the most about the Devil's Gulch is about a real historical figure that most people have heard of, the outlaw Jesse James.

It's said that back in 1876, he and his gang attempted to rob a bank in nearby Northfield Minnesota when things went sideways. In his attempt to escape, the legend says that James urged his horse toward Devil's Gulch and actually jumped across, much to the frustration of those chasing him. The Daughters of the American Revolution even set up a small museum nearby dedicated to Jesse James and this chapter in his life. But most people doubt the jump of 18 feet was even possible. Still, it's a thrilling tale, and those are the sorts of stories that tend to live on,

despite the doubts. But not all hellish locations and portals to the underworld are named after the Devil. In fact, some of them sound quite innocent, and one of the most famous of them all happens to be set in a place where we might never expect the Devil to go. Consecrated Ground It started like it almost always does, with people moving from one place to another. In the 1850s, it was a group of German immigrants, some of whom had lived in Pennsylvania for a while, who traveled west and settled in the gap between Topeka and Lawrence in Kansas.

In 1859, they even built themselves a place to worship, the evangelical Emanuel Church, and then replaced it with a permanent stone building about eight years later. In fact, they would continue to be a German-language congregation for another 40 years or so, which is just amazing. Now, the area the town is in had originally been called Deer Creek, but around 1900, the folks there decided to rename it after the local postmaster, a guy named Sylvester Stull, and that's what it's been ever since. Stull, Kansas

Now, the church there was a lot like any other church across America from that time, and that includes what was set up outside, a cemetery. For generations, it was the place where locals interred their dead, and even though the church itself was abandoned and left to the elements in 1922, the graveyard is still active. But that's not the only thing that's active there on the consecrated ground of the former church, because over the years, rumors and legends have sprung up to fill in the gaps, and once you hear them, you'll understand just how terrifying some people find the place to be.

The core legend is that the church is a portal to hell. Some stories point to the church foundation as the place where this devilish doorway is located, while others say it's found beneath a particular gravestone in the cemetery. In many stories, it's the gravestone of a witch who was rumored to have given birth to a baby for the devil. Twice a year, on Halloween and the spring equinox, the devil is said to use the stairway hidden beneath the grave to climb out of hell and visit our world. But that doesn't mean the stairs aren't usable other times of the year.

According to the legend, those who find them and descend into the earth will feel time pass more slowly than it does on the surface, a trick of the devil to trap you there. People who have visited the sites have reported ghostly hands that grab at them from the shadows. Unexplainable sounds have been heard, and shadowy figures that no one can identify, all of the sorts of things one might expect at a haunted location. And let me tell you, if the rumors are true, these stories have spread far and wide. One tale claims that on a trip across the United States in the 1990s, the pope apparently had his plane rerouted so that it wouldn't pass over stall.

In a similar fashion, the English rock band The Cure are said to have refused to play in Kansas because singer Robert Smith didn't want to go near the place. But here's where I bring up some issues with the legend. Even though the church and the town date back a century and a half, the first time any of these portal-to-hell rumors appeared was in a November 1974 article in a student newspaper called the University Daily Kansan. Right there are the first mentions of the time distortions and other supernatural experiences. Still, if we've learned one thing about folklore over the years, it's just how quickly it can

spread, no matter how little evidence there is to support it. On Spring Equinox of 1978, just four years after that first campus newspaper article, over 150 people gathered in Stull Cemetery to watch for the devil's arrival. By the 1980s, crowds could measure over 500 on some nights, enough to earn a police presence. And there is a witch buried in the graveyard. Well, someone whose last name is Widdich, and that's probably close enough for the true believers. But there's no proof the pope ever redirected a flight to avoid stall, and the Robert Smith

rumor more than likely came about because one of the critics of the legend was a University of Kansas folklore professor named, you guessed it, Robert Smith. But folklore is a lot harder to kill than that. Even today, the legend persists. And although the church building itself was demolished in March of 2002, the cemetery is still there and still in use by the local residents. The story also went on to inspire one writer to create a cast of characters in a world where the unexplainable and the otherworldly are real and possible.

So fictional, this world spent five years building toward a dramatic conclusion in Kansas at the church that once stood there in Stull. And at the center of the story were a pair of brothers, hailing from the nearby Kansas town of Lawrence. And the name of this fictional world that gave new life to the old legends about Stull, the long-running hit television show Supernatural. The evidence is apparently all around us. Everywhere you look, there are places with devil in the name.

Some of that blame falls on the way locals viewed the condition of their land, as all those devil's potato patches demonstrate. And a lot of it is thanks to the early Puritans and their habit of viewing everything as either God's will or the machinations of the devil, with no gray area in between. Their approach to the world around them was sort of like that old saying about how when you have a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. And that culture continued outside the boundaries of Puritan communities. As America grew and people started pushing farther and farther west, they took those

notions with them. If it was land once occupied by Native Americans and there was some sort of feature that was wild enough to draw attention, it would earn a name with the devil in it. A popular example is the Tower of Stone in Wyoming that's all that remains of an ancient volcano. Today, it's known as the Devil's Tower. And if you've seen close encounters of the third kind, it's that thing that Richard Dreyfus scopes out of mashed potatoes.

And some people think its modern name is a result of a mistranslation. You see, the Lakota people have traditionally referred to the place as Bear's Lodge. But the word for bear in their language is wahansika, which is super close to another word, wakansika, which means evil spirit. To the U.S. Army officer who recorded it as Devil's Tower back in the 1800s, it never even occurred to him that the translation could be wrong. As far as he was concerned, it fit his worldview perfectly. And if we return to that idea that Satan literally means the deceiver, maybe there was a devil

there. After all. The number of Devil place names across the United States is honestly a bit overwhelming. And each one of them has a story to tell. Some we would enjoy, and some not so much. But I have one more story to share, and it takes one of the places I've already mentioned and moves it in a whole new direction. Stick around through this brief sponsor break to hear all about it.

Back in California, near the Devil's Gate Dam outside Pasadena is a man-made tunnel I mentioned earlier, affectionately referred to as the Portal to Hell. Given the legends about the area, its name is probably a bit too predictable. But we're talking about folklore here. Not logic. I guess we just need to roll with it. John worked near the dam in the 1930s and 40s as a scientist. And those stories were very attractive to him.

In fact, at one point early on, he and a couple of friends made a trip to the Portal to Hell, just to see what all the fuss was about. John apparently liked it so much that he located the company he helped found less than a mile from the dam and its Devil's Gate. It was almost as if John led a double life. By day he was pushing the boundaries of science alongside some of the brightest minds in the country. But outside of work, he was drawn toward the supernatural.

Pagan poems, chants, magic spells, you name it, he was deeply interested in it, along with his buddy Lafayette. The most salacious things John was known for were the rituals he would host at his house in Pasadena. And these were everything an episode of television would love to portray as the stereotypical satanic ritual, naked bodies, symbols painted on the floor, and lots of candles and shadows. John went as far as to declare himself, and I quote, the anti-Christ loosed in the world, and to this I am pledged that the work of the beast 666 shall be fulfilled.

His activities even caught the attention of someone you've probably heard of before, Alistair Crowley, who was an Englishman known for his writings on the occult and ceremonial magic. In fact, Crowley had founded a religious order of his own back in 1903 called the Ordo Templi Orientus, and John, it turns out, was a huge fan. My guess is what John loved the most about this religion was its focus on sex and drugs, two things that showed up a lot in his home rituals. The police were frequently called about the activities there, too, with one report stating

that a neighbor looked out their window to see a pregnant woman, completely naked, jumping back and forth over a blazing fire in the backyard. But every story has a speed bump, right? For John, it was work. It seems they didn't like his after hours behavior. I mean, most hobbies are totally fine, but his were the sort that people latched onto and gossiped about endlessly. So in 1944, they fired him, separating what they viewed as a madman from their highly

sensitive, classified projects. And then there was his buddy Lafayette. He lived in John's house in Pasadena, so the pair could devote all of their time to rituals and magic. And in 1945, he even assisted John in a ritual known as the Babylon working, which was designed to summon an elemental being known as the Scarlet Woman. When a 23-year-old cartoonist named Marjorie Cameron appeared on his doorstep a short while later, John assumed it had been a success.

But life is always full of curveballs. Shortly after all of that, Lafayette took off with John's girlfriend, Sarah, as well as $20,000 of John's life savings, and went to start a new religion of his own. John and Marjorie would get married in 1946, and together they would continue his work experimenting with his personal blend of science and magic. John's story came to an end in 1952, when an explosion in his home laboratory ended his life at the age of 37. Marjorie would continue her work as an artist and a cultist for the rest of her life, before

passing away in 1995. Lafayette had much better luck. He took that money he stole from John and rolled it into a new endeavor, founding what would become known as the Church of Scientology. Of course, folks don't remember him by his first name. Thanks to his middle name, Ron, he will forever be known as L. Ron Hubbard. And John? Well, folks still talk about him today, too.

But just like his buddy Lafayette, they know him by a different name. Jack Parsons was on this earth only for a short time, but he contributed big things to the world as a literal rocket scientist. In the company he helped found, Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Better known as JPL. This episode of lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with research by Cassandra De Alba and music by Chad Lawson. Lore is much more than just a podcast.

There's the 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. For video fans, lore is also on YouTube. Each new episode is released alongside the podcast but in talking head style video format. Be sure to subscribe and leave a comment. 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.

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