Lore - Episode 96: The Long Good-Bye

Episode Date: October 1, 2018

Life is full of challenges. From learning new skills to climbing the social ladder, most people struggle with the hurdles we’re forced to overcome. But when it’s all said and done, few things are as difficult as something all of us will have to face some day: saying good-bye. 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.

They had gone into it with very low expectations. Most of the 800 graves had held nothing more than the skeletal remains of their occupants, and even the first four lead coffins proved to be just as disappointing. So we can't blame them for standing over the fifth with no hope of anything different. The archaeologists were working their way through the burials at the site of a convent in western France in the city of Rennes. The ground had been opened up to begin construction on a convention center, but came to a halt when the 17th century graves were found.

This particular lead coffin was among them. When they pulled the lid open, they were astonished. The body inside was not a dry skeleton like all of the rest, but the well-preserved remains of a woman. She was still wearing the clothing she'd been buried in, too. Shoes, wool stockings, a simple brown habit, a cap, and a veil. All the telltale signs that this was the grave of a nun. But the coffin held a deeper story.

This woman might have been buried as a nun, but she hadn't always been one. In fact, archaeologists know for sure that she'd been married and widowed. They know this because she was found with a precious relic, a small, lead, heart-shaped box containing her dead husband's heart. She had lived and loved, and then life had taken that love away. Even though she had spent her last remaining years in a convent away from the rest of the world, she did so with a small reminder of her loss tucked away in a box. And then she was buried with it.

Moments like this, frozen in time so long ago and left for us to rediscover, are powerful reminders of just how fleeting life can be. Every day holds a new distraction, a fresh disaster, or something in between. We get so wrapped up in the little challenges of each individual moment that we forget how someday all of it will come to an end. Sometimes the hardest thing to do is to say goodbye. I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore. Daniel was born in 1833, in the Scottish village of Curie, about 7 miles to the west of Edinburgh.

There were rumors that his father was the illegitimate son of a local Earl, but no one was ever able to prove that. Instead of luxury and provision, Daniel was born into a poor household with little to offer him. And if the stories are true, it was an abusive environment that offered him little hope. I'm not sure how it was arranged, but around the age of one, Daniel was adopted by his aunt, a woman named Mary Cook. Together with her husband, she pulled Daniel out of the hopelessness of Curie and into

their own home east of Edinburgh, on the Seacost, and that's where Daniel spent his first few years. He was described as a delicate boy and prone to illness. He was slim and pale, and always looked a little sickly, with a tendency to be a bit of an anxious child. But there were other things that made Daniel even less ordinary. The trouble is, they're just a lot more difficult to believe. According to his Aunt Mary, Daniel spent a lot of time in his cradle as a baby.

It was the sort that could be rocked if the baby inside needed to be soothed or comforted. On more than one occasion, though, she claimed to have entered the room to see the cradle rocking slowly back and forth. Stepping closer, she was shocked to find Daniel sleeping soundly inside it. While the cradle rocked on its own remained a mystery, but Daniel provided her with other unsettling moments as he grew older. At the age of just four, she claimed that he spoke to her about the death of a cousin who lived many miles away.

Daniel apparently described the particulars of the child's death in great detail, and when all of it came true, his aunt and uncle could do nothing more than scratch their heads. In 1842, when Daniel was just nine years old, the cooks packed up and left Scotland, crossing the Atlantic to set up a new life in Greenville, Connecticut. They bought a house, made friends, and enrolled Daniel in school there in town. And that's where he met Edwin. Daniel and Edwin were inseparable over the years to come. After school, they would retreat to one of their homes to read their Bible together before

heading outside for grand adventures and long conversations. They shared a lot of common interests, but one of their biggest passions was the world beyond our own, the afterlife. The boys had heard a story called The Lady with the Black Ribbon, which tells the tale of a couple in love. So in love that when the man tragically passed away, he returned to visit his lover from beyond the veil. In the story, the spirit of the man apparently touches the woman on the wrist, leaving a

permanent mark, which she then covers with a black ribbon. Daniel and Edwin were enamored with the idea of returning from the grave to say goodbye. So they made a pact. If one of them should die, they promised to return three days later and appear before the other. It was a promise that hinged on a lot of very specific ideas and beliefs, but the boys were committed to it. In 1846, Edwin's family moved away, separating the close friends for the first time in four

years. Later that year, according to Daniel's own account, he knelt beside his bed one night to say his prayers, only to be interrupted by a darkness that seemed to fill one end of the room, and out of that darkness stepped the glowing form of Edwin. Edwin didn't speak, but instead pointed upward and drew three circles in the air above his head before vanishing forever. Daniel called out to his Aunt Mary, who ran to his bedroom to see what he needed. When he told her that Edwin had died three days earlier, she laughed it off.

Later that week, though, a letter from Edwin's parents arrived, confirming what Daniel already knew to be true. If all of these moments were clues along the way towards showing Daniel that he was special, the biggest one arrived just three years later. In 1850, he felt the urge to go visit his mother, who had moved to America years before to be closer to Daniel and her sister, his Aunt Mary. But while he was there at her house, she told him about a recent dream she'd had. In it, one of her children, who had died in childhood, appeared to her.

This child informed her that she would die in exactly four months, and that this death would be sudden and happen without any loved ones nearby. Even after everything Daniel had witnessed with his own eyes over his short life, it was hard to believe her story. Four months later, Daniel's mother was on a trip out of town when a sudden illness forced her to seek the help of strangers. While they cared for her, a telegram was sent out requesting her family to come and see her.

By the time they arrived, however, she had already passed away. Four months after the dream, suddenly and without family at her side, just as the dream had told her. Daniel already had to say goodbye far more than most children his age. Goodbye to Scotland, goodbye to Edwin, and now, after all those years apart, goodbye to his mother. It was painful, yes, but it was also revealing. Daniel had inherited something from his mother that had opened new doors and offered amazing

possibilities. And it was only just beginning. Less than a year after the death of his mother, Daniel's aunt kicked him out of her house at the age of 18. It might seem like a heartless thing to do to a young man who had lost so much, but for Mary Cook, it was all about religion. At first, the trouble arose outside the house, when Daniel decided to attend a less strict denomination for himself.

For his aunt Mary, who was a staunch Calvinist, Daniel's choice of the local congregational church felt like a slap in the face, but it was inside their house where the trouble really took root. That's where new, unexplainable things were taking place. Knocking sounds could be heard throughout the house. Sometimes doors would open on their own. Other times, it would sound as if the entire place were shaking. There were reports that furniture moved across the floor, all on their own, and sometimes

even floated above the floor. And through it all, Daniel was convinced that the knockings were a form of communication from forces beyond the veil. Spirits. Reaching out to talk. And when taken into account with all of his previous adventures with the supernatural, Daniel's aunt had become worried. She reportedly confronted him on the matter.

So you've brought the devil to my house, have you? In response to the otherworldly activity that had invaded their home, she sent Daniel packing. Daniel quickly settled into an itinerant lifestyle, traveling between the homes of friends where he would stay for a while and try to avoid wearing out his welcome. His first stop was in the town of Willamantic, and it was there that he held his first public seance. Had said that during the event, one of the spirits that reached out to speak with him was that of his dead mother.

Fear not, she told him. Yours is a glorious mission. You will convince the infidel, cure the sick, and console the weeping. At another seance near the home of his aunt, Daniel informed his hostess, one Mrs. Force, that a spirit had offered to reconnect her to a long-lost sister who moved away years before. Daniel wrote down the name of a town far out west, and when Mrs. Force wrote the community there asking about her sister, that sister replied personally.

Otherworldly successes like that don't stay under wraps. People love to talk, and as Daniel continued to demonstrate his amazing gifts, the communities around him whispered in astonishment. And how could they not? Daniel had the ability to reconnect them with loved ones, whether they'd been separated by distance or death, all of which brought crowds to his doorstep. That only got worse after Daniel conducted his first healing. It happened when he was living in the Connecticut town of Lebanon.

One afternoon, while in a sort of trance, a voice spoke through him, instructing him to go to a specific address six miles away where a woman was ill and in need of help. Daniel climbed off his bed, made the journey, and found the home. Sure enough, inside was a woman who had just become ill minutes before. After introducing himself and his mission to the woman's husband, Daniel was led inside, where he placed his hands on her body, instantly healing her of all the pain she had been feeling. Hundreds of people became convinced by this new, powerful demonstration of his unusual abilities, and with the attention came all sorts of odd offers.

One wealthy, childless couple offered to adopt Daniel, despite the fact that he was an adult and on his own. He stayed with them for a short while, but left after it became clear they weren't planning to give him any rest from the constant seances they kept requesting. Others who noticed him included the well-known poet William Cullen Bryant and Judge John Worth Edmonds, who was a justice of the New York Supreme Court. They noticed his messages from the other world, his powerful healings, and his supernatural ability to provide lost information.

The most noticeable characteristic of his seances, however, was the levitating table. Very frequently, the table around which Daniel and his guests sat was reported to lift off the floor and hover in the air. Many times, the stronger people around the table would push down on it, trying to end the trick, but nothing would ever move it. The levitations all began in August of 1852, while conducting a seance in the home of a wealthy gentleman named Ward Cheney. During that event, Daniel also informed Cheney that one of the man's dead relatives, referred

to only as the Grey Lady, was annoyed because of the coffin that had been placed on top of hers. Cheney denied the truth of the claim, though. He knew the relative Daniel had spoken of. He'd even watched her burial personally, so he refused to believe the story. There was no coffin on top of hers. Still, Daniel persisted enough that Cheney finally took him to the cemetery where the woman was buried.

When they arrived, Cheney called for the undertaker to explain to Daniel how wrong he was, and that's when the undertaker dropped his head in shame and made a confession to Cheney. Yes, she had been buried alone, but just the day before, he had needed a place to bury a small child and use the space above the woman's grave. Cheney stood corrected, and Daniel was vindicated. Through it all, Daniel refused payments for his services, no matter how often it was offered or how large that payment might have been. In a world where spiritualism was quickly growing in the public space and attracting

all sorts of charlatans and frauds along the way, Daniel was an anomaly. He refused to get rich off his gifts. Instead, he actually wanted to walk away from it all. Maybe it was his life of constant illness, or those rare moments when he had a chance to heal someone else of their physical ailments. Whatever the motivation might have been, what Daniel really wanted to do was become a doctor. So in 1853, he moved to New York and began medical school. It was a plan that was short-lived, though.

Less than two years later, in January of 1855, Daniel was diagnosed with tuberculosis, that ever-present bacterial disease that seems to pop up in every Victorian era story. He was told he didn't have long to live, but they recommended a trip to Europe to see if the change in climate would help. Before leaving, Daniel embarked on a two-month tour of all his old friends. Through February and March, he traveled from town to town, doing what he had become so very good at doing, saying goodbye to the people he loved. He had reached the end of the road as far as he was concerned, and it was time to wrap

things up with a nice, neat bow. But Daniel was wrong. There was so much more to come. The steamer, called the Africa, left America on March 31st of 1855. Ten days later, it pulled into London and dispersed its passengers into that great city. Daniel home, no stranger to staying with friends wherever he traveled, made his way over to the Cox Hotel, owned and operated by an acquaintance of his. Rather than rest up and do nothing other than breathe that somehow different European air,

Daniel began to take on appointments. According to him, in less than one month, he had more meetings and appointments scheduled than he could physically manage. Word about his amazing abilities had spread across the Atlantic ahead of him, and it had fallen on hungry ears. Among the typical Seance attendees were lords and ladies of the British upper class. They came with questions and requests, which Daniel was happy to help them with. But they also gave Daniel's critics something to latch on to.

Like so many skeptics before them, they assumed he was a fraud, seeking only fortune and fame. Except, as I've mentioned before, Daniel took no payment for these events. In fact, a couple of years after arriving, the Union Club in Paris offered him the equivalent of $250,000 in modern American currency for a single Seance. And Daniel turned them down. One of his biggest critics in England was Sir David Brewster, a scientist and inventor best known for his work in physical optics and the polarization of light. Brewster was the prototypical scientist, and he sat in on a number of Daniel's seances

in an attempt to catch a fraud in the act. Instead, he left each session completely stumped. And I don't blame him. In fact, at one London seance, a spirit was said to have snatched the rings off the hands of everyone seated around the table. Then, a single disembodied hand appeared between them, each of the missing rings visible on its spectral fingers. A moment later, the hand vanished like smoke, and the rings fell to the table below.

If he faked it, we're not sure how. Daniel didn't stay in England long, though. In the autumn of 1855, just a few months after arriving in London, he traveled to Florence, Italy, where a countess from the Orsini family hosted him for a large gathering. They say she played piano for everyone there that night. And while she did, Daniel somehow caused the piano to levitate off the floor. Among the many legendary guests who have sat around Daniel's table, one historian included Napoleon Bonaparte and Tsar Alexander among them.

While he wasn't taking payment for his amazing displays of other worldly powers, he was certainly growing his network of famous friends. And a great example of this happened in 1858. That was the year Daniel married Alexandria de Krol, the daughter of a Russian nobleman. His best man was none other than Alexander Dumas, author of The Three Musketeers. It's clear that while he might not have been wealthy in the traditional sense, Daniel was becoming rich with friends. But no amount of fame or fortuitous connections could prevent tragedy from striking Daniel's

life. Just four years after their storybook wedding, Alexandria was laid low by tuberculosis and died a short while later. Daniel was just 29 years old, and the loss understandably crushed him. When he returned to England after the loss of his wife, Daniel received yet one more offer of adoption, this time by a woman named Mrs. Lyon. Her offer included the handsome sum of 60,000 pounds, a small fortune to a wandering spiritualist. And perhaps it was his recent loss, or the exhaustion of so much traveling and entertaining.

This time he decided it was an offer worth taking. The catch, of course, because there's always a catch with an offer like that, was that Daniel was supposed to introduce Mrs. Lyon to all of his high society friends. But when those introductions failed to happen, she took him to court to reclaim the money. She won, too, although it didn't seem to have phased poor Daniel. He continued to travel, continued to conduct more of his sought-after seances, and he continued to amaze people. Years later, on December 13th of 1868, Daniel performed one of his most memorable and written

about feats of levitation. He had been invited to a large home in Westminster and was surrounded by lords and ladies, some of whom were friends while others were complete strangers. During his performance, it was reported that Daniel himself levitated up off the floor, rotated to lay horizontal in the air, and then slowly drifted out an open window, three stories above the pavement below. After a few moments, he re-entered the house through a different window, righted himself, and then touched back down on the floor.

After that, life began to calm down for Daniel home. Skeptics continued to investigate and harass him as he got older, but none of them ever managed to prove him to be a fraud. In 1871, he married for a second time, to yet another Russian heiress, Julie de Gloomelin. That same year, Daniel officially retired, at the young age of just 38. While his health had always been a pressing concern, it had begun to deteriorate even more quickly, and he needed all the rest he could get. The world held its breath expecting the worst, but somehow Daniel pulled through again.

The tuberculosis that had driven him across the Atlantic and then disappeared, finally returned in 1886 while he was in Paris. He passed away on June 21st of that year, just 52 years old. After a life of saying goodbye to others, the world found itself returning the favor. Daniel home had stepped beyond the veil. I wonder if he found what he was looking for. There are few things as difficult as saying goodbye, whether it's the sale of your childhood home or the loss of your beloved grandmother.

As the present, quietly slips into the past, and we're powerless to do anything to stop it. This of course was one of the central pillars that held up the entire tent of spiritualism. Loss and letting go had become an overwhelmingly common human experience, and to the people who followed that movement, their hunger for hope was insatiable. People like Daniel home came to represent exactly that, hope. He was something of an enigma, really. Like a lot of the traveling spiritualist performers of the late 19th century, he drew enormous

crowds and seemingly limitless attention. People were clearly hungry for answers to life's difficult questions, and anyone claiming to be able to communicate with the spirits beyond the veil quickly became a star. At the same time, though, Daniel wasn't going about it all in the expected manner. Unlike the Fox sisters, he wasn't selling tickets to his séances or accepting monetary gifts from his most loyal supporters. Instead, he remained little more than a wanderer, drifting from place to place as the waves of friendship and public demand pushed him along.

He became a celebrity, but refused almost all of the perks that came with it. Still, we know what drew everyone else to Daniel's performances. The realities of life and death, of sickness and misfortune, all of it had a way of causing doubt and fear. While he might have been best known for levitating tables and secret knowledge, people were really just looking for answers and hope. And at the end of the day, that's what Daniel offered them. There were a lot of skeptics, though.

People who thought they smelled a fraud and believed that if they just looked hard enough, they could unmask the wizard behind the curtain. Most walked away more frustrated than when they arrived, but a few came away as believers. One investigator would later declare Daniel home to be a rare breed of medium who ticked all of the major boxes. He was clairvoyant. He could move objects with his mind. He could speak with the dead, and the dead could speak through him.

And he was also a genuinely beautiful human being, full of humility and charity. This investigator went on to write about how, during the Siege of Paris in 1870, Daniel used to pass out cigars to the wounded Germans around the city. He was a unique individual who had been greatly misunderstood. When his most useful and unselfish life had come to an end, the investigator later wrote, It must be recorded to the eternal disgrace of our British press that there was hardly a paper which did not allude to him as an imposter and a charlatan. The time is coming, however, when he will be recognized for what he was, one of the pioneers

in the slow and arduous advance of humanity, into that jungle of ignorance which has encompassed it for so long. That investigator and writer, by the way, wasn't just some random journalist or well-positioned friend with an agenda. He was a knight, a medical doctor, and a successful novelist who left a mark on popular culture that can still be seen today. He was none other than the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I hope you've enjoyed this journey through the wonderful and unbelievable life of Daniel

Douglas Holm. If you're like me, though, you're going to want to hear more. Thankfully, I've managed to track down one last tale to share with you, and it's more than a little uplifting, if you know what I mean. Click around to hear all about it after this short sponsor break. As I mentioned earlier, one of Daniel's first seances was at the home of Ward Cheney, a wealthy silk manufacturer from the Hartford area. Cheney had a great love of the supernatural, and he saw a lot of potential in young Daniel.

Others were invited to that seance as well, including a man named Franklin Burr, brother of the editor-in-chief of the Hartford Daily Times. But unlike Cheney, Franklin Burr wasn't there as a believer. He was there to debunk and disprove what he perceived to be a fraud. Daniel was blindfolded, and the seance was conducted in a well-lit room. There would be no tricks, no ropes, no pulleys, or hidden levers. Burr wanted this event to be transparent and open. He knew that many other celebrity mediums had already been exposed as frauds, and Daniel

Holm represented his chance to add one more name to that list. At first, Daniel claimed to communicate with a number of spirits. Despite the blindfold, he managed to write down their messages, using a board with words pre-printed on it. Unconvinced though, Burr asked him to focus on one spirit in particular and go deeper. Tell us the story, tell us what they want, prove that this is real. So Daniel told them of the spirit of a sailor in the room, and as he did, witnesses say that the room filled with the sound of howling wind.

It was as if they were on the high seas in stormy weather, and as the sounds grew louder, the table itself began to tilt and rock. Burr looked for signs of trickery, and that's why he was there, after all. But he would later claim that although he had a clear view of the space beneath and around the table, there was absolutely nothing suspicious to be found. Table was just moving. A moment later, the table stopped tilting and simply rose nearly a foot off the floor, and there it hovered without explanation.

Burr threw himself on the table, as did a few others, but the table would not sink back down. After a few frustrating moments of wrestling with the floating furniture, Burr cried out for irrefutable proof, a sign that could not be explained away with tricks or sleight of hand. He demanded it. In response, he later wrote, Daniel's body was lifted off the chair and raised high into the air.

So high, Burr said, that the young man's head and hands touched the ceiling of the room, and that was the moment of transformation for Franklin Burr. He entered the home of Ward Cheney as a skeptic that day, but he left as a true believer. Two days later, he published his experience in the newspaper and told the world his story. One last detail, Daniel had another vision in the spring of 1876. In it, his old friend Ward Cheney had passed away. Driven by the premonition, he sat down that very afternoon to write a letter to Cheney's daughter-in-law to express his sadness for her loss.

When the letter arrived weeks later, having been carried across the Atlantic on an ocean liner, Cheney's daughter-in-law was shocked to see the date that Daniel had written at the top of the page. March 22nd, the very same day Ward Cheney had died. This episode of Lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with research helped by Marseille Crockett and music by Chad Lawson. I make another podcast called Aaron Mankey's Cabinet of Curiosities, and I 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 10-minute episode is a bite-sized collection of two short tales that show you just how unexplainable our world really is. And Lore exists outside this podcast, too. There's the book series in bookstores around the country and online, and the second season of the Amazon Prime television show arriving on October 19th. Check them both out if you want a little bit more Lore in your life.

And you can always learn more about everything going on over in one central place. The World of Lore.com slash now. And finally, if you use social media, you can follow the 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.