Lore - Legends 42: Written in Stone

Episode Date: December 9, 2024

Stone is a powerful tool for recording history. But if the stories are true, the tales it tells can also hide dark and menacing secrets. Narrated and produced by Aaron Mahnke, with writing by Alex Robinson, and research by Jamie Vargas and Robin Miniter. ————————— Lore Resources:  Episode Music: lorepodcast.com/music  Episode Sources: lorepodcast.com/sources  All the shows from Grim & Mild: www.grimandmild.com ————————— Sponsors: Quince: Premium European clothing and accessories for 50% to 80% less than similar brands, at Quince.com/LORE for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Squarespace: Head to Squarespace.com/lore to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using the code LORE. SimpliSafe: Secure your home with 24/7 professional monitoring. Sign up today at SimpliSafe.com/Lore to get 20% off any new SimpliSafe system with Fast Protect Monitoring. ©2024 Aaron Mahnke. All rights reserved.

Fifty years ago, a young woman named Karen Silkwood got into her car alone. She was reportedly on her way to deliver sensitive documents to a New York Times reporter. She never made it. And those documents she'd agreed to carry were never found. Do you think somebody killed her? There's no question in my mind. Someone killed her that night. I think they were trying to stop her in order to get the documents.

A new investigation into the life and death of America's first nuclear whistleblower. Listen to Radioactive, the Karen Silkwood mystery from ABC Audio. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Lore Legends, a subset of lore episodes that explore the strange tales we whisper in the dark, even if they can't always be proven by the history books. So if you're ready, let's begin. It's safe to assume that he knew what he was doing.

Sure, Dr. Jesse William Lazier hadn't started out his mission thinking that he would kill himself. He was there to save lives, not take them. Jesse, you see, was one of the foremost medical researchers in the country, studying yellow fever since 1895. By 1900, the high mortality disease had killed hundreds of thousands of people. Entire cities would be ravaged, and during the Spanish-American War in Cuba, five times as many men died from yellow fever as they did on the battlefield.

Something had to be done. And so, after the war, the United States Army brought doctors down to Cuba. Reporting to Quimadas in 1900, Jesse joined some of the best medical practitioners in the country, and together they formed the Yellow Fever Board, hoping to discover the root cause of the disease. In the end, it was Jesse who figured it out. He believed that infected mosquitoes were transmitting yellow fever through their bites, but there was no way to prove it without sacrificing people by forcing mosquitoes upon them. So, Jesse did

what he had to do. He intentionally let a mosquito bite him. Within days, he was dead, and everyone knew exactly what had killed him. Within days, he was dead, and everyone knew exactly what had killed him. Today there is a memorial to Jesse in Washington, D.C.'s National Cathedral, a pane of stained glass depicting a man injecting himself with a deadly shot. It's a part of a larger window entitled Sacrifice for Freedom. There, Jesse's bravery is enshrined forever, immortalized in glass and lead. We all want to leave our mark on the world, to leave some kind of legacy behind. Not many of us will be lucky enough to be depicted in a cathedral window or put into

the history books, but there is still hope that somehow we will be remembered long after we're gone. People have left legacies behind for as long as humans have been around. Big or small, we can all carve out a place on this Earth. But for some, that mark has been a bit more literal than figurative, because sometimes their legacies were written in stone. I'm Aaron Manke, and this is Lore Legends. All throughout human history, we've been scribbling on rocks. It makes sense if you think about it.

Paper is a relatively modern invention, all things considered. And long before paper or even parchment were in the picture, people still had the very human urge to record their life experiences somewhere. They were just itching to draw out a successful hunting trip or write an ode

to a lover. Rocks were the perfect solution. You could paint on them, carve into them, cut them. It all worked. And most importantly, whatever you put onto stone would last, and it would last for a very, very long time. That's one of the funny things about humans, after all. We all want our mark on the world to last forever, even if that mark isn't entirely serious, which for many whose writings have survived into the 21st century, it rarely was.

See, one of the most prevalent stone carvings we see throughout history is actually graffiti. It may seem modern to us, but graffiti isn't a new thing. In fact, it's ancient. The first cave drawings were made thousands of years ago, and humans never really stopped defacing rock faces after that. As casual and unserious as it may appear, graffiti has always documented the true human experience. In Egypt, for example, the tomb of Ramses VI is covered in thousands of inscriptions

made by tourists. And they weren't the kind who wore Hawaiian shirts. No, these Greco-Roman tourists were nearly as old as Ramses himself. One review from a disgruntled visitor reads, I visited and I did not like anything except the sarcophagus. Another reads, I cannot read hieroglyphics. And there's something comforting in knowing that ancient Roman tourists were not much different than your average reviewer on TripAdvisor.

No matter how much time passes, it seems, people never change. Something else that never changes? Lude graffiti. The human race has always had something inappropriate to say. One of my personal favorites comes from the walls of a basilica in Pompeii where someone carved, I hope your hemorrhoids rub together so much that they hurt worse than they ever have before. Another spot of graffiti from Pompeii said, Adametis got me pregnant.

The Pompeians weren't the only ones, though, who wanted a record of their romantic conquests. In the 12th century, a group of Viking warriors took shelter from a snowstorm in a burial chamber dating back to 3000 BC, and they left it completely covered in runes. Many were of a sexual nature, while the most tame were just ancient humblebrags. One says, These runes were carved by the man most skilled in runes in the western ocean. And another says, Fulfeer Kolbingsen, carve these runes high up. Over the years, some messages have been carved into stone simply to remind us that someone had been there.

One from ancient Palmyra reads, This is an inscription that I wrote with my own hand. My hand will wear out, but the inscription will remain. And you've got to love that, right? Perfectly on the nose and straight to the point. It's insightful while also representing the commonness of marking a place. But over the centuries, our ancestors have used graffiti for more useful purposes as well,

such as keeping track of the weather. All over Europe, researchers have found what they call hunger stones. These stones date back many centuries and they've mostly been found within the Elbe River. The concept was simple. When the river got too low, the stones would become visible, and if the stones were visible, that meant that it hadn't rained in far too long, which in turn meant that drought and

crop failure were imminent. It was a sort of warning system and a chilling one too. One small stone has a carving on it that reads, We cried, we cry, and you will cry. And one of the most famous hunger stones in the Czech Republic has an inscription that reads, When you see me, weep. That same rock also has dates carved into it, starting in 1417 and ending in 1893. They mark every year that drought got bad enough to reveal the stone.

And beyond that, rocks were even used to record laws. In fact, one of the first written legal codes in human history was carved into a four-ton stone slab. Known today as the Code of Hammurabi, it was created during the reign of the Babylonian king Hammurabi around 1750 BC. The carving includes 282 legal precedents, outlining everything from the exact punishments that criminals could receive for all manner of offenses and the intricacies of family law to what working professionals could charge fairly for their labor. It's this very set of laws that gave us the phrase, an eye for an eye. From the Rosetta Stone to prehistoric cave paintings, we have used rocks as a canvas to tell our stories, and those tales have followed us all the way into the 21st century,

their permanent nature ensuring that we will never have a chance to forget. In 1940, the archaeological world was turned upside down and it was done by a group of teenagers. On September 12th of that year, an 18-year-old boy was out walking his dog when he found a depression in the ground that seemed to go much deeper than your average hole. So he fetched a few of his friends, and soon enough these four French teens were dropping down into their newly discovered cave system. Hoping that it might be some kind of secret passageway, they decided to investigate further. But instead of hidden tunnels, they found something far more precious.

The cave walls were completely covered in paintings. Nearly 6,000 figures and symbols decorated the stones, depicting wild horses, oxen, mammoths, and humans. The red and black pigments seemed to shimmer under the beam of their flashlights, each painting more vibrant than the last. They didn't know it yet, but they had stumbled upon some of the most well-preserved prehistoric cave paintings on Earth, estimated to have been created almost 20,000 years ago, and it was beautiful. Ever since, the Lascaux cave has

been called the Sistine Chapel of Prehistory, and through its artwork we've been given a window into what life might have been like for our Paleolithic ancestors. Now, archaeological discoveries dating back thousands of years are nothing new, although some, like at Lascaux, are more remarkable than others. But the world is still littered with evidence of the humans who came before us. Long, long before us. Sometimes though, these archaeological discoveries don't always work out quite as smoothly as the Lascaux cave did, and sometimes their founders aren't as guileless as the young teenagers were. Out in Ohio, there was an

entirely different sort of artifact waiting to be found, and in November of 1860, a man named David Weirich would be the one to dig it up. David was exploring an indigenous burial mound 10 miles south of the city of Newark when he unearthed a sandstone box, and within that box was a mysterious stone. A robed figure was etched into the slab, along with an odd form of Hebrew writing. In fact, the entire stone seemed to be inscribed on all sides with what he deduced was some version of the Ten Commandments. It came to be known as the Decalogue Stone, and it wasn't David's first jackpot. Just a month earlier

he had uncovered another rock that he called the Keystone. This artifact was oddly also covered in Hebrew, but unlike the Hebrew on the Decalogue Stone, this version seemed to be similar to that used in the Dead Sea Scrolls. the Decalogue Stone, this version seemed to be similar to that used in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Together, the Decalogue Stone and the Keystone were creatively dubbed the Newark Holy Stones, and some people were all too happy to use them to push an agenda. You see, there were many who believed, and still do, by the way, that the ten lost tribes of Israel actually traveled to the New World and that they were the original Native Americans. These missing tribes have often been the subject of speculation, but this is one of the most prevalent conspiracies regarding the matter.

Make no mistake, though, any connection between the two cultures is completely non-existent. It's a theory that's based in large parts on the prejudice of white communities who didn't want to accept that Native American tribes could have their own rich culture and history. But the discovery of these Hebrew stones in Ohio seemed to change all of that. Suddenly here was evidence, it seems, that a Hebrew-speaking community had once been in North America long, long ago. Or at least that's what some people thought. In 1861, just a year after his discovery, David Weirich released a pamphlet outlining his evidence.

It should have been a triumphant moment for him, but it was tainted. Most untrained people accepted his findings, but something about the physical evidence gave members of the academic community pause. The Hebrew script on the holy stones wasn't quite right because it was too modern, and once people got a closer look and studied the depth and the weathering of the carvings, they realized that there was no way that the text had been written thousands of years before. Today, the decalogue stone and the keystone are known to be a hoax. If David didn't plant them in the ground himself, then it's believed that someone else did it

so that he would find them. Either way though, they aren't real. Regardless, they are still on display to this day in Ohio's Johnson Hummerick House Museum, where they still attract visitors who believe in the missing tribes of Israel theory. David Weirich was a con man, eager to push an agenda that had no basis in fact. For him, stone was the perfect canvas to paint his lie. But just because something is carved into stone doesn't mean that it's true. And as history has shown us time and time again civilization probably isn't the phrase that comes to mind,

and an ancient civilization of white people? Completely absurd. But for a while, that idea inspired an entire branch of archaeology. In January of 1877, Reverend Jacob Gass was participating in an archaeological excavation near Davenport, Iowa, when he announced that he had made an incredible find. Now, even though Gass served as a Swiss minister at a local Lutheran church, his true passion was antiquities, and so he jumped at any chance to dabble in archaeology, including this 1877 project, the excavation of an indigenous burial mound.

It was a good thing that the reverend had joined in, too. Otherwise he might have missed the find of a lifetime. You see, Jacob unearthed two slate tablets. One was etched with hunting scenes, while the other was covered in curved lines and circles that seemed to make up the rudimentary outlines of a calendar. The local Davenport Academy of Sciences was just as thrilled by this discovery as the Reverend was. They had been desperate to prove that Iowa was once the home of an ancient society of

mound builders, and this discovery brought them closer to understanding what these mound builders may have been like. Now the phrase mound builders is really just a general term. It's not tied to any one tribe or society. It just means the people who, in pre-Columbian America, built large earthen mounds, often for burial, and these mounds have been found all over America, including just outside of Davenport, Iowa Today we know that there were multiple tribes across North America who built effigy mounds which can still be visited today And they remain sacred spaces for the descendants of those tribes But the Davenport Academy of Sciences wasn't interested in native mound builders

No, they subscribe to a theory that these structures were actually built by ancient white European settlers who predated the native tribes. Fans of this theory believe that the white people were stamped out by violent tribes, but that before that they had created a rich American empire. Not everyone bought into this though. In fact, Thomas Jefferson himself tried disproving the theory. There were mounds on his land at Monticello, and he personally funded their archaeological excavations. Jefferson, although usually not a great champion of non-white peoples, was adamant that the mounds had not been built by a lost race of white men, but by Native Americans. And yet, the theory persisted.

Between the mound builder myth and the Lost Israelite myth, it was clear that many white Americans were just unable to accept that the Native American tribes around them had been there first, and that they had their own technological advances and were smart enough to build powerful societies. It was just easier for Americans to believe in a false history. It's unclear why the Davenport Academy of Sciences believed that these newfound stone tablets might have been from an empire of white mound builders, but they did, and they encouraged the Reverend to find all that he could about them. The following year, in 1878, he uncovered a limestone tablet in yet another mound.

This one actually had color on it and depicted a red figure with a bow and arrow, and after that, he uncovered a pipe shaped like an animal that resembled an elephant or a mammoth. Reverend Gass continued his digs for the next five years until he moved away, and all of them, it turns out, were financially backed by a wealthy attorney named Charles Putnam. The reverend's findings had been gathering a lot of buzz in the archaeological community too. So it was no shock when in 1884 the Smithsonian's Bureau of Ethnology published a report about them. It wasn't the glowing praise that most people had expected it to be though. Instead, their report questioned the authenticity of the carvings.

Outraged by this, Jacob Gass's financial backer Charles Putnam issued a response, and with that, an all-out academic war was born. Putnam and the academics in Washington traded increasingly antagonistic articles in scientific journals, with experts calling him out as a fraud and Charles insisting that all of their discoveries were legitimate. And they were. At least, both a fraud and Charles insisting that all of their discoveries were legitimate. And they were. At least, both the Reverend and Charles thought they were. But both of them, it seems, were wrong.

Eventually the state archaeologist of Iowa, a guy named Marshall Baskford McCusick, got involved in the fight. He published two very large papers, each one dissecting the entire drama, and in the end, he identified what really happened. Do you remember what I said earlier about the Reverend being a Swiss minister? He was really Swiss, as in a recent immigrant from Switzerland. And it seems that the Davenport Academy of Sciences weren't too happy with the fact that an immigrant was sticking his nose into their archaeological projects and that he bragged about his success.

And so, the Academy of Sciences had secretly created the tablets themselves and then put them in the burial mounds for the Reverend to find. After he uncovered the first ones, they planted the second, and all the while, they were laughing at the Reverend's gullibility. In the end, it was the Academy, and not Reverend Gass, who had orchestrated the hoax. There's something attractive about stone. It's always there, barely changed by time and the elements as perceived by our limited temporal human lives, so it's easy to see why our ancestors chose it as their go-to

format for permanent records. Even today, we refer to unchangeable decrees as set in stone. We bury our loved ones in grassy parks, their graves marked with slabs of stone that bear their names and dates, our best option for a lasting, and maybe even eternal, reminder that they once lived among us. But as history has shown us, stone has been just as attractive to those who want to spread lies. Whether it was an Egyptian pharaoh chiseling away references to a hated predecessor, or the holy stones of Ohio, the quest for truth has often, quite literally, put us between a rock and a hard place.

And the same was true in Davenport. Jacob Gass and Charles Putnam became laughingstocks of the scientific community because people were told that they were frauds. It must have been a bitter pill to learn that the whole ordeal had been a set-up designed to ruin them. But the worst part? The Academy had assistance from an unlikely place. The Reverend's own family.

In a real Cain and Abel-like turn of events, Jacob Gass's brother Edwin, along with his brother-in-law Alfred Blummer, had been the ones to actually create the fake artifacts. Unbeknownst to Jacob, they had helped make a laughing stock of him. Reverend Gass and his backer Charles Putnam truly didn't know that their artifacts were fake. I think we need to acknowledge here that archaeology doesn't have the cleanest history. For a long time, it was used to perpetuate ideas that had been made without much evidence to back them up, fitting a square peg into a round hole, if you will.

It seems that there have always been people who have used their platform to spread ignorance instead of knowledge. And the best we can do with the legacy they left us is to improve upon their work and move forward. Because while the past may be carved in stone, our future is certainly not. I hope you enjoyed our journey today as we made our way carefully through the rocky past. Yes, stones have been powerful tools for ancient cultures to leave reminders of themselves, but they have also given fakes and frauds an inflated sense of truth. The fact of the matter, though, is that you don't have to stage an elaborate hoax to leave your

mark on the world. And as one final story will show, when it comes to rocks, some might even leave their mark on you. Stick around through this brief sponsor break to hear all about it. This episode of Lore was made possible by Quince. It's great when you can get someone a gift they wouldn't necessarily get for themselves, that little bit of luxury that they don't know they're missing. And for quality gifts at an affordable price, my go-to is Quince. Quince lets you treat your loved ones, and yourself, to everyday luxury at an affordable price. Something everyone needs in their closet, in my opinion, is Quince's iconic Mongolian

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Head to simplysafe.com slash lore. That's simply safe dot com slash lore. There's no safe like simply safe. Here are your rocks, the letter read, nothing but trouble. Another pleads, Please put this back so my husband can get well. I tried to keep him from taking it. Yet another letter reads, This stone with misfortune abounds. To you I am now absolved. And yet a fourth says, This little rock wanted

to go home, so I sent him. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of letters just like these sitting in a room in Arizona, and upon arrival each and every one was accompanied by a little rock. Or rather by something that looks like a rock, because at the Petrified National Forest Park, a rock isn't always a rock. Don't get me wrong, the region is basically just one giant fossil. But these fossils didn't start out as stones. The Petrified Forest, once a lush tropical wetland, is now part of the Painted Desert. There may not be many trees anymore, but we can still see the remains of the trees that

once lived there. Two hundred million years ago, a volcanic eruption buried the area in ash and sediment. And that's when the long process of transforming them into petrified wood began. Petrified wood feels like solid stone, but it's probably more accurate to say that it's a mineral compound. After wood is buried under the earth, it can gradually fossilize its organic material, slowly being replaced with sediment, until it looks and feels like a rock. And I do mean slowly, this entire metamorphosis takes hundreds of thousands,

if not millions of years to occur. Today, the National Park's ground has eroded enough that its petrified wood is now exposed to the elements, and to human eyes and hands. And while access to these remarkable formations is certainly a special opportunity for both researchers and tourists alike, sometimes ignorant people can ruin it for everybody. Now, the Petrified Forest National Park has been home to native tribes for at least 13,000 years, but it didn't come across the radar for white settlers until the mid-1800s. The travelers were so fascinated by the phenomenon that they frequently pocketed pieces of petrified

wood, you know, as a souvenir. Today, taking fossils from the park is illegal, but most people haven't changed since the 19th century, and for many, the petrified wood is just too tempting to leave behind. Today, the park estimates that they lose about 12 tons of petrified wood from the park every year. But don't worry, it always finds a way to come back home. Since the 1930s, visitors have reported experiencing extremely bad luck after taking petrified wood from the park. In 1935, the park actually received its very first letter bemoaning the senders' regret

that they ever stole the petrified wood in the first place. These letters have been dubbed conscience letters, and the park hasn't stopped receiving them ever since. The legend has come to be known as the curse of the Petrified Forest. No one really knows how people decided that their pilfered goods were cursing them with rotten luck. One theory claims that the entire idea actually originated from Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, where it was believed that the native fire goddess Pele cursed anyone who took lava

rocks from the island. Somehow that concept made its way to the mainland and it attached itself to the Petrified Forest National Park. But no matter where the whole idea came from, people believe it. The park holds over 1,200 conscience letters, all of which express in some way or another that their lives have gone downhill since stealing their little pieces of petrified wood. Their personal tragedies have ranged from financial woes to relationship problems and health issues.

One letter from 1983 even says that the sender almost choked to death on a vitamin and then that his car died at the Grand Canyon. It's all just a hodgepodge of general misfortune. No matter how unrelated their experiences are though, they all seem to agree that it's the curse's fault. Most of the letters are sent with the stolen petrified wood. Sometimes the wood is returned after just a few days and sometimes after decades. But the sad thing is that the wood can never be returned to the park.

Now that they're essentially foreign objects, they would disrupt the natural environment. So the petrified wood is stuck in limbo, with more and more tons of wood added to a pile every year. So if you want to leave behind a positive legacy, then I would say the last thing you should do is steal from one of our national parks. And if you don't want to take my word for it, don't worry. I have a feeling that nature will take care of it for you.

This episode of Lore Legends was produced by me, Aaron Manke, with writing by Alex Robinson and research by Jamie Vargas and Robin Minniter. Don't like hearing the ads? Friends, I'm with you, but I've got a solution for you. There's a paid version of Lore that's available on two different platforms, Apple Podcasts for those who use Apple Podcasts as their app and Patreon for those who use every other app. And all of them are 100% ad-free.

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Information about all of that and more is available over at lorepodcast.com. And you can also follow this show on threads, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube. Just search for Lore Podcast, all one word, and click that follow button. And when you do, say hi. I like it when people say hi and as always thanks for listening in the dry states of the southwest there's a group that's been denied a basic human right.

In the Navajo Nation today, a third of our households don't have running water. But that's not something they chose for themselves. Can the Navajo people reclaim their right to water and contend with the government's legacy of control and neglect? Our water, our beauty. Our water, our beauty. That's in the next season of Reclaimed, the lifeblood of Navajo Nation. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts.