Lore - Episode 92: Stronger

Episode Date: August 6, 2018

There is a lot in life that we can control, but no system is perfect. Every now and then, circumstances pull the rug out from underneath us and leave us powerless. But at least one surprise turn of events had a different affect, and the results have left us with questions that are still unanswered today. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com Access premium content!: https://www.lorepodcast.com/support See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Nearly 400 years ago, the Austrian city of Innsbruck had a celebrity, but not the way you might imagine. We know about him from a leaflet printed in 1620 with its tiny text and stark black and white woodcut image, and it's not a pretty sight. This man, Wolfgang Schaeder, had apparently been a healthy normal middle-aged carpenter in 1604, but then illness took all of that away. It began with a headache before moving on to his limbs. Soon he was completely paralyzed, unable to do anything other than move his eyes and tongue.

The image shows us an emaciated man, naked and twisted upon a small bed. His ribs are like the keys of a piano. His limbs are bone-thin, and his eyes are sunken deep in his skull. But he's alive, and according to the heading above him, he was the symbol and landmark of the city. Which doesn't make a lot of sense, I know. The additional headline makes it more clear. It was the 17th century version of YOLO.

Live your life, it says, the way you wish you had lived it when you were dying. The man's withering form was meant to serve as an example to the entire city that life was fleeting, which is why the man's bed was placed outside a local church, so parishioners could see him as they entered. Our health is a tenuous thing. It's clear from the stories like that of Wolfgang Schaeder that when we least expect it, life can change dramatically. This has a way of reducing us to something less than what we are, leaving us helpless

and afraid. The pages of history are full of stories of injury and sickness reducing people to nothing but a shadow of their former selves. But hidden among those tales is a different kind of story, one that stands out because it shrugs off the typical and trades it in for something much more bizarre and unexplainable. On the way, it forces us to ask an important question. What if suffering isn't the only thing our weakness reveals? I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore.

Mary didn't have an easy life, even from the start. Born in 1846 to James and Elizabeth, she was the first of five children to fill their Brooklyn home with laughter. But life is never free from pain. It arrives like an unwanted house guest when you least expect it. For Mary, it was the death of her mother. The illness took Elizabeth down so quickly that she called upon her sister, Susan Crosby, to come and help.

Susan was single and available because of her own personal tragedy. The man she'd planned to marry had died just months before after contracting yellow fever. Soon after arriving, Susan lost a sister, and Mary lost a mother. But Susan stayed on to care for the family and fulfill her promise to Elizabeth to specifically watch out for Mary. Molly, she said, using Mary's nickname, is a child of sorrow. That sorrow didn't manifest in the form of mood swings or pessimism, though. In fact, Molly thrived in the years to come.

She attended a local preparatory school that focused on training women to become teachers. She excelled in all of her classes and was on her way toward a promising career in the world of education when life took an unexpected turn. A short time before she was set to graduate, Molly became ill. Her body started rejecting most of the food she ate, and as a result, she spent most of her time weak and sick. The illness became so bad that she ultimately had to drop out of school, crushing her hopes and dreams in the process.

Molly's aunt Susan took her to a number of doctors, but the best diagnosis they could get for her illness was that Molly suffered from indigestion. And I know, super specific, but remember that this was the mid-1800s, not the 21st century Mayo Clinic, so we should set our expectations a bit lower. Her prescription was just as unusual, too. Horseback riding was recommended as a way to combat the indigestion and bring about healing. Molly began those riding sessions in April of 1864.

She chose a horse that was a bit ill-tempered and spent the first couple of weeks getting used to him. Through that, though, it was just a matter of getting out into the park regularly for long rides in the fresh air, and for a while, it seemed that the therapy was working. A month later, on May 10, all of that changed. Near the end of a ride, her horse became spooked and violently threw her off the saddle. Molly impacted on the pavement with enough force to break two of her ribs and knock her unconscious, and when she awoke, she was in the hospital.

The fall had done more than just knock her out and break some bones, though. One of her lungs had been punctured by a broken rib, and it continued to bleed long after the accident. She'd lost all feeling below the waist, too, and her eyesight seemed to be failing as well. But Molly was stubborn and brave, and after months of rest and recovery, she was on her way back toward a normal, healthy life. A little over a year after her accident, in June of 1856, Molly planned a little vacation.

She was going to travel north to the city of Boston to see friends, and in a move that any of us would find familiar today, she went shopping for new clothes. When she was finished, she took a streetcar home. When it reached her stop, Molly stepped off, arms full of packages. But the driver of the streetcar wasn't paying attention, and he rang the bell and urged the car forward while one of her legs was still on board, pulling the world out from beneath her. Molly was thrown to the pavement in a painful echo of her riding accident, only this time

she wouldn't stay where she fell, because the streetcar was more dangerous than a horse. As she landed, her dress caught on a hook that protruded from the back of the car, so when it moved forward at full speed, it actually dragged her with it, like a dented can tied to the bumper of a wedding limo. People say that the car drove nearly a full city block before the driver noticed and brought it to his stop. It was too little too late, though. The damage was done.

A few people managed to carry her to a nearby butcher's shop to wait for help. She was unconscious again, and had rebroken multiple ribs. She had cuts and scrapes all over her body, and blood ran from the corners of her mouth. But she somehow survived, and a few weeks later, she was back home under the care of Aunt Susan and the rest of her family. But life had changed dramatically for Molly. She would never leave her house again. There was some recovery.

After many weeks in bed, Molly was able to get up and walk slowly around the house with help, but there were complications to that. Specifically, her left leg had become locked in a bent position and refused to straighten fully to the floor. To make matters worse, her eyesight was slowly failing. She experienced intense pains all along her spine, and her right arm would sometimes go numb. Between all of that and the constant infection in her lungs as a result of the previous puncture,

the winter of 1865 to 1866 was a challenge for Molly and her family. In fact, all of the physicians who examined her predicted that death was just around the corner. It was out of their hands, and only time would tell. In February, something changed. Molly fell asleep and failed to wake up, so Susan called for a doctor. They were told that the young woman had passed away, but Susan refused to accept that the end had come, so she took a spoonful of brandy diluted with water, forced Molly's jaw open,

and poured it in. In response, Molly's entire body went into spasms before settling back into a death-like stillness. It repeated like that for hours, first silence, then seizures, over and over, while everyone else stood by helplessly. After that, Molly changed again. She went from limp and unconscious to rigid and immovable. It was as if she had become a mannequin, and it was unusual enough that her aunt Susan

became desperate. She gave the doctor freedom to try whatever he felt might help her niece. It was an invitation into a very different world. First, the doctor stood Molly's rigid body up against a wall and proceeded to rub her limbs with alcohol. He shaved her head and attempted to use heat to blister her scalp in an effort to release bad fluids. He brought in the equipment necessary to try shock treatment and even went as far as

to reposition Molly's bed in the room to better line up with the Earth's magnetic currents. Eventually, Molly completely lost her hearing and eyesight. In the calm spaces between seizures and rigidity, she stopped trying to move or get up. After a year or so, the only sense she seemed to still possess was touch, communicating through light movements of her fingers on the hands of her visitors. All the while, they were trying to prevent Molly from starving to death. They would manage to get food into her mouth and even to swallow it, but soon after, she

would vomit it all back up. The doctor tried using liquid food and a feeding tube, but that failed to work as well. Everyone agreed that Molly was wasting away, and if it wasn't stopped, she would most certainly starve to death. But that's where it gets bizarre. Molly never did starve to death. She carried on with almost no food for months. Sure, they managed to get a tiny amount of liquid into her from time to time, but according

to the records that were written down by her on Susan, Molly had essentially stopped eating. She had begun to resemble that historic mascot of Innsbruck that I mentioned earlier, Wolfgang Schaeder. Illness had arrived like a horrible house guest, and it was leaving its mark on her body. But something else was happening at the same time. While Molly's body was withering and contracting, something inside of her began to grow and expand, a power that no one was ready to believe. Molly herself later recalled when it happened,

About the month of May, 1866, my second sight, a power or sense of seeing, began to develop. First I seemed to have a consciousness of the position of things around me and the movements of persons, without actually seeing them with my eyes. It began innocently enough with her old wrist watch. It had been removed months before and placed on the mantelpiece on the far side of the room. No one could see it from her bed, but somehow Molly could tell them the exact time shown on its face.

They couldn't explain it, but it was happening. It sounds skeptical, I know, but a lot of people assumed that she could either somehow see the watch or that she was just making really good guesses about the time of day. I know people who have a pretty good sense of time, but guessing the exact time on a specific watch in a room sounds like an extraordinary accomplishment. After that, Molly turned her second sight to other things. She predicted approaching thunderstorms long before the skies became dark outside, or nearby fire alarms long before they went off.

But the most unusual predictions involved visitors to the house. Before the doorbell rang, she would state matter-of-factly who it was outside on the porch, only to be proven right each and every time. For months, Molly had been trapped inside her body with almost no freedom to speak of. But suddenly, she had become more powerful than anyone else under her roof. She began her illness as yet one more symbol of how life tends to break us down and erase us. But now, she was becoming something more.

Something beyond. Molly Fancher, it seems, was becoming a medium. Molly had become the embodiment of contradiction. She wasn't eating, and yet she was still alive. She was blind, and yet she could see things no one could explain away. And while she spent most of the next 12 years immobile in her bed, lying in the exact same position each and every day, there were brief exceptions to that new normal. Once, she stood up and re-enacted an entire wedding, with all the talking, singing, and

dancing you might expect. On another occasion, she acted out the motions involved in taking her dog hunting in the woods. Even stopping to load her imaginary gun and take a drink of the whisky she'd brought along. But the unusual behavior didn't stop at simple re-enactment. As the months went by, Molly began to speak with the voices of other people. It was as if she had become a radio, and the frequency would change, allowing her to become other people. Whenever this happened, though, her symptoms would seem to melt away.

One voice identified itself as a little girl named Rosebud, while another was a more grown-up identity named Pearl. Ruby was the fun-loving, active voice who seemed less interested in Molly herself and more interested in the world around her. She also demonstrated more of her unusual second sight. She seemed to be able to follow friends and family members outside the house, even though she was trapped in bed. When they came to visit at the end of the day, Molly would describe in perfect detail

everything the visitors did that day, right down to their jobs and clothing. She could identify the contents of a sealed envelope, reading word for word the letter inside or describing the people in a covered photograph. When letters or photos were placed in her hands, they say she could read them by running her fingers over them, and even identify people in the photographs that way. Naturally, the spiritualist community fell in love with her story. For a movement of people who believed deeply in our ability to push beyond this world into the next and to become more than we appear to be, Molly Fancher was both a wonder and

a puzzle. They discussed her case at length, hypothesizing about the human body's ability to shift senses from one organ to another, such as moving the sense of sight to the tips of her fingers. But there were far more skeptics than believers. One was a man named Dr. William Hammond. He was a physician who had made a name for himself three decades earlier with his research into digestion, but more recently, he had been writing about some of the popular cases

involving what he called the fasting girls. In fact, it wasn't Molly's unusual gifts that initially caught his attention. It was the claim that she had gone so long without eating. His goal was to disprove these sorts of impossible claims, which he called fraud and hysteria. That word choice, by the way, hysteria, was intentional on his part. Today hysteria is a word that carries the connotation of mass panic or uncontrollable fear. But in ancient times, it was a word that covered all manner of symptoms that were believed

to emanate from the uterus. In fact, hysteria comes from the root word hysteria, which is the Greek word for uterus. By the time of Molly's story, at the end of the 19th century, hysteria had come to be thought of less as a physical illness and more of a psychological one. Dr. Hammond believed that Molly suffered from some form of hysteria, and that led her to pretend to starve. Symptoms aside, Hammond was essentially declaring that Molly couldn't be trusted simply because she was a woman.

This dismissive prejudice led Hammond to Molly's home, where he spoke with her family and examined the young woman in hopes of debunking what he viewed as an obvious fraud. That's where he encountered the stories of her second sight and unusual abilities. Curious about their truthfulness, and more than a little suspicious that it was all just part of that same act that included the starvation, Hammond proposed a test. He went to the bank and obtained a certified check for $1,000, and then sealed it in an envelope. Returning to Molly's home, he placed the envelope in her hand and told her that if she could

recite the details inside, who signed it, the amount, and the check number, he would donate that money to a charity of her choice. Molly, though, refused to be tested in such a way. Believing the young woman was more interested in keeping the money for herself, Hammond later extended a similar offer, only this time he told her she could keep the check if she could read through the envelope. But Molly was done with being the center of his experiments, and politely declined his offer.

In 1879, Hammond published a book about Molly and other women in similar situations, entitled Fasting Girls. It was condescending and dismissive, and more than a little sexist. Molly, however, stayed in bed. She had arrived there after her second accident in 1865, and 14 years later, little had improved. She would stay in that bed, cared for by family and friends, for the rest of her life. The story of Molly Fancher sits at a very unique intersection. On one side, we have that historic lineage of saints and martyrs who used fasting and

suffering as a tool to get closer to God. On the other side, though, there's the modern world, where Molly's 19th century life connected deeply with both the scientific and medical community. She was a bridge, spanning the gap between two very different worlds. She wasn't the first, though. In a lot of ways, our landmark of Innsbruck, Wolfgang Eshader, spanned his own wide gap. Most today believe that while the cot he laid on each day was placed right outside his local church, it was also across the street from the hospital.

It's a juxtaposition that contrasts spirituality with science, faith with evidence, and a higher power with an inner strength. Stories of the unexplainable are never cut and dried, and if our goal is to pin them down on only one side of the line, we'll always end up frustrated. Looking back, it's difficult to say what really happened to Molly. I think any one of us would have a hard time believing that she lived the rest of her adult life without ever eating again, but the testimony of the people around her seems to contradict that, or at least what they were willing to admit.

The same could be said for her unusual abilities. Yes, they did appear once her body was broken and limited, and yes, there are a lot of witnesses to her claims. The notion of second sight or remote viewing doesn't necessarily line up with common sense or logic. In the end, it's up to each of us to make our own minds up about who Molly really was. She was either an exception to the rules or an exceptional fraud. No matter what she really was, her story was attractive to a lot of people.

Dr. William Hammond wasn't the only one who wanted to dig deeper into her claims. A spiritualist writer named Abram Daley sat down with Molly in the early 1890s and put together a book about her story called Molly Fancher, the Brooklyn Enigma, and she received a visit from an agent representing another man interested in her unusual talents, P.T. Barnum. He was apparently intrigued by her story as a starvation artist and sent his agent to Brooklyn to offer her a job in Barnum's traveling menagerie. She could stay at home with her powers and suffering, or she could take it on the road

and earn herself a handsome paycheck. Molly, ever the one to avoid the spotlight, declined the offer. In 1916, Molly reached the 50th year of survival from those tragic accidents of her youth. She had recovered very slowly over those five decades and finally regained the use of her arms and eyes. She'd even started eating again, although her diet was mostly liquid, consisting of juices, broth, and water. As a result, she'd put weight back on and was stronger for it.

But there was another side effect in her return to the world of food. Her second sight faded away. There's no way we can definitively say that her starvation and suffering turned on some sort of latent ability within her mind, but I can't help but wonder if it was more than just coincidence. To celebrate her 50th anniversary of survival, Molly invited hundreds of guests to her house, all who filtered through her room for a chance to shake her hand and say hello. There was food and wine, and lots of laughter inside the house that day.

It was probably a welcome change, but it was also the last the world would ever see of her. Molly died a few weeks later, at the age of 68. She lived a life that so many of us can relate to. After suffering through two horrible accidents, she began to walk that same long road through life that we all have to tread, the one where we just grit our teeth, do our best, and hope for a better tomorrow. Pain and suffering seem to be something we can all expect at some point in our lives,

but Molly showed us there was hope. She was the living embodiment of the old cliche, whatever doesn't kill you only makes you stronger. During Molly Fancher's long life inside her home, her ability to eat became a weakness that followed her for decades. Hunger for her was a fate she was forced to accept and make the most of. Some think it even revealed her power to the world. After the sponsor break, I want to share a similar story with you.

Like Molly, hunger plays a key role, as does weakness and suffering, but this person's extraordinary power is something any of us could summon should we ever have the need. Stick around to hear all about it. Constance was born in 1869 into a wealthy family from the British ruling class. As such, she was afforded every luxury available to her through her youth, but there were echoes of Molly Fancher in her future. Constance, by the way, was the granddaughter of Edward Boulwer Leighton, who was an Earl and novelist in the mid-19th century.

He was a close friend of Mary Shelley and is known for coining the phrases, the pen is mightier than the sword, and it was a dark and stormy night. When Constance was 23, she fell in love with a man who happened to be from a lower social status, but despite begging her parents for permission, was denied the freedom to marry him. It was one of those first tastes of the lack of rights women possessed in Victorian England, and Constance didn't care for it one bit. In 1908, Constance threw herself into the suffragette movement, working alongside thousands of

other women to fight for their right to vote. She attended meetings and rallies, and eventually began to give speeches of her own, becoming a key figure in the movement. It was their demonstrations outside the House of Commons in 1909 that led to her imprisonment on three separate occasions, along with a friend named Elsie Howie. Trapped inside and with very little they themselves could control, Constance and Elsie chose to refuse the food that they were given by their jailers. They asked nicely, and she politely declined.

They asked more strongly, and she offered stronger words in return. When our legislators ceased to resist enfranchising women, she told them, then I should cease to resist taking food in prison. When her starvation became life-threatening, the jailers stepped in with more drastic measures. Orderlies were brought in who could hold Constance down, and then a doctor would come in with a rubber tube and a bowl of liquid food. A metal device was strapped to her face that prevented her from closing her jaws, and then the tube was inserted all the way down to her stomach.

The first time it happened, it was so traumatic that Constance vomited the food back up and all over the doctor. In response, the man slapped her and then left the room. In the memoir she published years later about the experience, Constance says she laid on the cold stone floor of her cell after everyone left, sobbing and screaming with anger. A few moments later though, she could hear the sounds of a similar struggle coming from the cell next door where Elsie was being held. Constance could hear the orderlies speaking roughly with her friend, and the shrieks as

the metal device was fitted to her jaw. She could hear the low murmurs of the doctor and the sickening sound of gagging, and then it was quiet. Constance dragged herself to the wall between their cells and raised her voice as loud as she could manage. No surrender, she shouted to her friend. There was a long moment of silence that Elsie finally cried out in reply. No surrender, she said.

No surrender. This episode of Lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with research help from Carl Nellis and music by Chad Lawson. As I mentioned before, I make another podcast called Aaron Mankey's Cabinet of Curiosities, and I really think you'd enjoy it. It's a twice-weekly podcast that explores some of the most bizarre events, objects, and people in history. Each episode is a bite-sized 10-minute collection of two short tales that show you just how

unexplainable our world really is. Lore exists outside of this podcast, too. There is a book series in bookstores around the country and online, and the Amazon Prime television show is heading into its second season this coming October. Check them out if you want more Lore in your life. And you can always learn more about everything going on over in one central place, theworldoflore.com-now. 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.