Lore - Episode 94: Hard Rain

Episode Date: September 3, 2018

Our understanding of the natural world is incredibly advanced compared to our ancestors from a few centuries ago. We have established rules and order to help us frame how everything works. On occasion, though, those rules have been broken, and the results have been absolutely terrifying. 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.

There's nothing like a good thunderstorm. I say that, of course, as someone who grew up in the Midwest. With a flat landscape and open sky, it was possible to see dark storm clouds roll in from a great distance, and they always seemed to put on a show. Charles wasn't born in the Midwest like me, but he had a powerful attraction to the natural world. If it happened, he wanted to document it, and that hunger for knowledge extended to the weather, unusual storms, extraordinary occurrences, and unexplainable conditions.

Stories like that made up the bulk of his first nonfiction work, called The Book of the Damned. Stories like this one. It seems that a storm blew into the Kansas City, Missouri area on July 12th of 1873. The sky became incredibly dark, the sort of dark that makes you think of apocalyptic movies, and then a torrent of rain was unleashed on the city below. Rain and frogs, living, breathing amphibians that fell from the sky and covered the landscape. Charles went on to build a career out of gathering and sharing these extraordinary tales. And while much of the world has forgotten the name Charles Fort, almost everyone has

encountered the term for his particular brand of paranormal research. Fortian. Even today, we're still left scratching our heads at the wonders of the natural world. There's so much that we know, and yet in the grand scheme of things, we've barely scratched the surface. Charles Fort documented hundreds of cases of unnatural rain, including frogs, but also ants, worms, and even fish. And while we think we know the true reasons behind them, it doesn't change our fascination

with it all. The natural world is a mysterious place. That's why we've spent thousands of years studying it. The more we know, the less there is to fear. At least, that's the assumption. The trouble is. More thirst for answers has led us into darker territory, where the natural order of things seems to have broken down.

And when the rule book is gone, horrible things can happen. I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore. Albert was one of those people who refused to fit into a box. Of course, there was a lot about him that made perfect sense. Born in Bavaria in the early 13th century, he entered the Dominican order and began a career in the church, which eventually led to him becoming Bishop of Regensburg. But Albertus Magnus, as he would come to be known, also had interests outside the walls of the church.

At some point in his career, he stumbled upon a reference to a lost work by Aristotle, a catalog of gems and stones. To someone like Albertus, who believed that everything should be studied and written down, this loss of knowledge was tragic, so he set about recreating it on his own. It would be called the Book of Minerals, and he gathered his material by traveling all over Germany to visit mines for a first-hand look at how the extraction of gems and valuable ore actually worked. During one of those trips into a German mine, he encountered a rock that completely baffled

him. He described it as thin and sharp on one side, almost like an axe, but it's his description of how the rock was formed that is the most interesting aspect of the story. According to him, this was the type of stone that was black or red in color, that falls from the clouds and splits beams and penetrates walls, and is called by the common people a thunder axe. It wasn't a new idea, though. Six centuries before Albertus, another bishop recorded a similar observation.

Isidore of Seville wrote in the early 600s about a stone he called a glassopetra, or literally a tongue rock. He claimed it fell from the sky during a waning moon, and it was said to possess great power. Magicians, he wrote, suppose that by means of it, the moon can be made to move. Yet another bishop wrote a book about geology in the 1100s. Bishop Marbeau de Vren wrote in his book of stone about a rock called Seronius. He claimed it was only found after lightning strikes, and that after falling from the sky like a shooting star, it could be collected and used to protect against future lightning

strikes. This idea of a thunder stone that falls from the sky wasn't just limited to the European continent. One of the contemporaries of Albertus Magnus was an English writer known as Bartolomeus Anglicus, literally Bartholomew the Englishman, which is super creative, I know. He wrote in 1240 about how these thunder stones were formed. When it thunders horribly, he wrote, fire lights the air. When clouds smash together, this stone falls.

Over the centuries, more and more of these books of stone were written by scholars. One of the longest was written in the late 1400s and is still around today. It's called the Peterborough Lapidary, named for the cathedral where it was discovered, and its focus is on the magical and medicinal properties of rocks. There's a vast array of fantastical objects written about in this book, including stones that aid in divination, or serve as a protection against witches. Other stones are said to help people speak to the spirit world, while others give humans power to control demons.

And tucked inside, all that information is one other stone, known as the coparius. Coparius is described as a celestial stone that falls to the earth from the heavens above. Like other thunder stones throughout history, this rock was said to protect the owner against all sorts of maladies, including misadventure, lustfulness, and, you guessed it, lightning strikes. Together, all of these writers and their published works on the nature of stones has left us with over a thousand years of tales about rocks that fall from the sky. It's a classic example of how storytelling can be used to explain the parts of our world

that don't seem to fit the known laws of nature. Earth and air, stone and sky, these things are all supposed to stay in their boxes and obey the rules, but the exceptions tell us otherwise. Today we have the benefit of looking back on all those centuries of scholarship with a fresh eye. Our tools are more comprehensive, and our knowledge more expansive. But deep down, we're not much different than Albertus Magnus and his counterparts all those years ago, because, just like them, we're simply looking for the truth.

The world's most deeply strange and unsettling events don't just happen without a reason. Something created them, formed them, and dropped them in our laps, so to speak. And that's what makes one particular story so difficult to accept. Because if it is true, it's also terrifying. They called it the Great Island, because, well, it was big. Sitting at the mouth of Portsmouth Harbor, where the Piscataqua River divides modern-day Maine from New Hampshire, it was the first thing most travelers would encounter. Whether you were leaving the area to board a ship east, or you were visiting from somewhere

else, the Great Island was on the edge between the land and the sea. That's where Richard Chamberlain stopped on his way to England in 1692. Chamberlain had served as the royal secretary of the colony of New Hampshire for a time, but was on his way back to London to report on what he'd learned there. Before boarding a ship for his long transatlantic journey, Chamberlain stayed at the only inn on the island. This inn slash tavern was owned and operated by George Walton, and was essential to the community.

Taverns in the 17th century were a place where you could get food and drink, for sure, but they were also a gathering place for the community. Courts would be held in local taverns, and they served as a nexus for the trade in and out of the area. Staying in Walton's tavern wasn't unusual, and Chamberlain never thought twice about it. On Sunday, June 11th of 1682, Chamberlain retired to his room upstairs after a long day of travel, but was awoken a short time later.

According to his account, which was published in London in 1698, he was pulled from sleep around 10 p.m. by a loud thumping sound on the outside of the tavern's structure. Unsure of what might have caused such a thunderous noise, he climbed out of his bed and wandered down to the main room below, where he was startled to find Walton and some of his family gathered at the open front door of the tavern. They were looking out into the darkness, whispering among themselves, when Chamberlain approached and asked what all the noise was about. The answer Walton gave him was almost as surprising as the noise.

The tavern, he was told, had been pummeled by a shower of stones. Walton stepped forward and peered out through the open door to see for himself, and sure enough, the ground outside was littered with rocks, most of them as large as fists. All of the people gathered there at the door made the same assumption. Someone, or a group of someones, was tossing stones at the tavern. As they were talking about it though, two more stones fell inside the room. Chamberlain saw it happen with his own eyes and said they seemed to fall from the direction of the ceiling rather than a window or the open door.

Still, that didn't make sense. So they did what Logic told them to do. They closed the door. If the stones were being thrown at them from the outside, shutting the door would put an end to the prank. But it didn't. In fact, it seemed to get worse. Stones smashed through a couple of the windows and fell to the floor.

Others seemed to appear from nowhere and knock objects off of shelves. Two candlesticks toppled off one of the nearby tables, as did a large pewter tankard. Everyone would turn toward a new sound, and as their eyes were taking in the damage, another sound would catch their attention from behind. Over and over again, they did this strange dance chasing the unexplainable action around the room. At some point though, Chamberlain convinced Walton and the others to be more scientific about it all.

He began to gather the stones and place them on a nearby table, and noticed that, as he did that, each of them were hot to the touch, as if they'd recently come out of a fire. After a few hours of constantly dodging the stones and then gathering them up, Chamberlain decided to call it quits and return to bed. But running away wasn't going to spare him from the insanity. Just as he was drifting off to sleep for the second time that night, a fresh round of thumping rattled the side of the tavern. To Chamberlain, it sounded as if the new attacks were being aimed directly at his own room.

A moment later, a stone that would later prove to weigh over eight pounds crashed against the door of his room so hard that it forced it open. Alarmed by the noise, Walton and the others rushed upstairs to check on their guest. The stones eventually stopped falling on and in the building that night, but the next few days proved to be just as chaotic. More stones fell on Monday and Tuesday, but then took a break until Saturday when it resumed at full strength. Stones were even falling on farmers outside, and at one point, George Walton himself was

pummeled so severely that he received injuries that would plague him for the rest of his life. In the weeks that he stayed at the tavern while waiting for his ship to arrive, Chamberlain recorded more and more showers of stones, sometimes as heavy as 30 pounds. He wasn't the only official witness to the events, though. Other guests at the tavern included Walter Clark, the deputy governor of Rhode Island, and a royal customs officer named Edward Randolph, both of whom attested to the truth of Richard's testimony.

Despite the numerous witnesses, though, the events in and around the tavern continued to defy explanation. Were they being thrown by a group of pranksters with incredibly strong arms, or was it all a hoax put on by George Walton himself? The only thing they knew for sure was that they didn't know anything at all. And that was the most frustrating part. You can't control what you can't understand, and the constant shower of rocks on the area around the tavern was leaving everyone feeling powerless and afraid.

But all of that was about to change. You see, George Walton had an idea, and he wanted to test it out. If he was wrong, no harm, no foul. If he was right, though, then they had a bigger problem on their hands. Witchcraft It was a hunch, really. I mean, how else was George Walton planning to explain it? Stones kept raining down on him, whether he was outside of his tavern in the fields or

safely behind closed doors. It was clearly supernatural, and so he wanted to get to the bottom of it. And that began with an experiment. George and his wife Alice began assembling what was known as a witch bottle. It was a device of counter-magic, a sort of protective ward against the evil powers of a witch. It involved cooking a handful of bent pins inside a pot of boiling urine, and then pouring the mixture into a small glass bottle to be placed beneath the hearth of their home.

Except they never got to finish it. The first batch was ruined when a stone flew down the chimney and spilled the pot they were using. The second batch was struck by another stone, this time breaking the handle off and spilling the urine. Their third attempt failed when yet another stone came down the chimney and shattered the pot, spilling the mixture everywhere. For the Walton's, this was confirmation.

Clearly a powerful witch was at work, and they were trying their hardest to prevent resolution. And George knew exactly who that witch was, too. It was his neighbor, Hannah Jones. Hannah was the elderly widow that lived on the property directly next door to the Walton's tavern, separated by a strip of marshland. As everyone knew, her mother Jane Walford had been accused of being a witch back in the 1650s, something that plagued her for years. In fact, Walford had been tried three separate times by the people of Great Island, but each

time it happened, the courts ruled in her favor. As an aside, I want to add some non-essential details here. Not only did Jane Walford defeat the accusations of her neighbors, but she also countersued a number of them for slander, and she won. Maybe it helped that the Walfords were one of the biggest families on the island, or maybe she was just very good at taking her opponents down. Either way, she rolled right over them, each and every time, and I love that about her. Her daughter Hannah had lived with that reputation her entire life, so it's no wonder George

Walton cast his net wide enough to reach her property next door. But even though her family's connection to witchcraft was at the top of his list, Walton had another reason to dislike Hannah Jones. It turns out the two of them had been in the middle of a property dispute for 30 years. That strip of marshland between Walton's property and that of Hannah Jones had originally belonged to Hannah's husband, but Walton had this habit of staking claim to land he didn't own, building a house on it, and then suing his neighbors for possession. In 1652, he tried suing Hannah's husband, but lost, and Walton was ordered to remove

his fence and hand the land back over. Walton refused, and for the next three decades, the neighbors went to court over and over again, each time ending with the defeat of George Walton. At one point, Hannah went into the area between their homes and tore down a section of Walton's fence, so her cows could graze in the marshland. The tensions grew off and on this way for years, without ever reaching a compromise or resolution. Now, maybe the courts were just sick and tired of Walton's refusal to budge, or maybe a new generation of judges had a fresh take on the situation.

Either way, in 1660, Walton was awarded the land, but only if he paid Hannah for it. It was a court-ordered sale, in a sense, and he was bitter about that. So too was Hannah Jones. On Friday, August 3rd of 1682, the gate to the fence that separated Walton's land from another neighbor, John Amazine, mysteriously fell off. Amazine said it fell off so loudly that he heard it from inside his house, as if someone had fired a big gun. The following day, Walton led some farmhands out to repair the gate, and discovered that

the damage was more extensive than they'd realized. Portions of the fence that divided his land from Hannah's had also been torn down. Furious, Walton and his men got to work on the repairs, but while they were doing so, a shower of stones fell from the sky, pelting them. They ran for cover, but the stones followed them. There must have been a break in the mysterious rain for a little while though, because at some point the men headed back out to finish the repairs, while other servants began work in the nearby fields.

Soon enough though, the rain returned. The damage was extensive. Stones fell with such force that at least three of the sickles used by the servants were broken. One woman was struck nearly ten times by the falling rocks, while others were injured as well. I get the feeling they bravely plugged away at their work, but I'd imagine it was painfully slow. Over the next couple of weeks, the instances of the stone showers became less and less

frequent. By late August, they had slipped into the biggest lull since it had all begun, and it seemed as if the worst was over. Walton's accusations of witchcraft had landed Hannah Jones in court, and his fence was repaired. I think old George was feeling pretty good about himself at that moment. But pride comes before the fall. The fall of stones, that is. In September, George saddled his horse and made his way to the ferry so that he could

cross the river and attend the Portsmouth Council's hearing on the witchcraft case. He had been smiling, maybe even humming. He'd finally gotten her. The old witch was going to hang. That's when one final shower of stones descended upon him. He continued through it, riding as fast as he could, but the rain of rocks followed him. One of the stones was so large that it struck his head and split his scalp open, covering his face with a wash of thick blood.

I'm sure it hurt, but for a man about to step into the courtroom and call his neighbor a witch, it was also a bit of fortuitous physical evidence. Much like his fence, though, everything fell apart for George Walton that day. He entered the hearing, showed the examiners his split skull and bloody face, and explained what had happened. And they shut him down. Hannah Jones never went to trial, and George Walton went home, frustrated and beaten. It never rained stones on Great Island again.

I think the story of the stone showers of Great Island is a powerful example of tales that play with our expectations. We expect George Walton to be the victim, and for Hannah Jones, his antagonist, to finally get what's coming to her. But that mold is shattered by the historical context. It turns out that George Walton was, as the historian Emerson Baker calls him, the neighbor from hell. He was a quaker in the middle of a Puritan community, something that would have been

seen as a hindrance to their mission of religious purity. And he was highly litigious, too, taking countless people to court over things he honestly had no claim to. This was a guy who was so upset when public roads crossed a portion of his land that he would dig holes in them to make them unusable. He stole from his neighbors and owed large amounts of money to dozens of people on the island. And when he wanted town-owned common land, he would just build a house on it and then

take the town to court. He was a stone in the shoe of everyone on Great Island. History, at the basic level, is the story of people and events within a larger context. We can't talk about the American Revolution without discussing colonial taxation, or World War II without World War I. Everything is connected, and no story happens in a vacuum. Most of what we know today about the events on Great Island in 1682 come to us from that observant guest, Richard Chamberlain.

Sixteen years after it all happened, he published a short booklet about it and shared the story with the people of London. But it's important to understand who that audience was by 1698. For decades, the vast majority of people in England were united in their stance against witchcraft. That's why people like the self-appointed witchfinder general Matthew Hopkins was able to travel the countryside and execute alleged witches with such ease. In the middle of the 17th century, that was just the accepted norm.

But by the 1690s, all of that had changed. The witch hunt craze was a dying monster. Sure, it kicked and screamed from time to time, but by the early 1700s, it was cold and dead. The 1716 executions of Mary Hicks and her nine-year-old daughter Elizabeth were the last in England, and the Witchcraft Act of 1735 put an end to the criminality of traditional witchcraft. So Richard Chamberlain, as passionate as he was about the diabolical subject of Lithobolia,

the stone-throwing devil, was preaching to a very disinterested audience. Maybe he was trying to renew that old hatred, or perhaps he was just a grifter hoping to make a little money off a dying market. Either way, few people were listening. A word did spread. Many months after the Great Island events, stones fell on a family in Hartford, Connecticut. A decade later, the community in Gloucester experienced their own episode of Falling Rocks. And in the summer of 1692, a woman named Sarah Cole was accused of using witchcraft to shower

stones down on the Brown family in the town of Lyne. Cole was mobbed with accusations after that. Neighbors blamed her for everything from illness and supernatural sounds, to balls of fire and mysterious animal sightings. As a result, a warrant was issued requiring her to be examined by the authorities. After she was arrested, they transported her to a New England community that was still in awe of the power of witchcraft, still entangled in its own feverish embrace. A community that I'm sure you've heard of before.

The Massachusetts town of Salem. I hope you've enjoyed this exploration of Lithobolia and the events of Great Island in 1682. But there's so much more to explore. In fact, stones have held a magical power over us for a lot longer than you'd think. And one of my favorite examples of this dates back to our old friend, Albertus Magnus, and an amazing discovery he made. I'll tell you all about it, after this short sponsor break.

As I mentioned at the top of the episode, Albertus Magnus was an industrious and hands-on scholar. Rather than just building a new book about gems and minerals by talking with other scholars, he chose to travel to various local mines. Seeing his subject firsthand in its natural element gave him a unique perspective on the world of rocks. Once, as the story goes, Albertus was inside one of those mines when his escort handed him a large egg-shaped stone and pointed to a crack along one side.

Whether the next step was presented to him by the miner or an invention of his own, we don't know. But Albertus placed the stone down, took a hammer, and then struck it with enough force to break it cleanly open. Inside, he was amazed to see the outline of an animal. Its body was curled up to fit the shape of the stone, but Albertus could clearly see the curve of its spine and the long, elegant bend of its wings. Together with feet that he described as shaped like those of a fowl, it struck the scholar

as very bird-like. Except this bird was much larger than he would have expected, and there were details on the skull that didn't fit his understanding of newborn chicks. In fact, he thought of it as a monster, but how it had managed to find its way inside a rock was a mystery to him. The best explanation he could offer was that some life force in the earth had generated life inside a lifeless stone. Trapped inside, the creature clearly died before it could live, and then reverted back

to the stone it had come from. Looking back with our modern understanding of the natural world, it's clear that Albertus had discovered a fossil, but simply lacked the understanding to put the pieces together. But that's not the most amazing part of this story, because if his description is any indication, the fossil was definitely not that of a bird. It was a dinosaur. This episode of Lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with research by Carl Nellis and music by Chad Lawson.

You can find Chad on Spotify by searching Chad Lawson and kicking back and enjoy. I make another podcast called Aaron Mankey's Cabinet of Curiosities, and I think you'd really enjoy it. It's a twice-weekly podcast that explores some of the most bizarre events, objects, and people in history. Each 10-minute episode is a bite-sized collection of two short stories that show you just how unexplainable our world really is. Lore exists outside of this podcast, too.

There's a book series from Penguin Random House that's available in bookstores around the country and online, and the third book in the series comes out on October 9th. It was an Amazon Prime TV show with a second season premiering on October 19th, and you should check them both out if you want a little bit more Lore in your life. And you can always learn about everything going on, new and upcoming, over in one central place. The World of Lore.com slash now. Oh, and hey, if you're a social media sort of person, Lore is on Twitter, Facebook, and

Instagram. Just search for Lore podcast all one word and click that follow button. When you do, say hi. I like it when people say hi. And as always, thanks for listening.