Lore - Lore 291: Dream Come True
Episode Date: October 20, 2025We often use the phrase “dream come true” to describe wonderful things you envision for our lives. But looking at the folklore behind it, there might be a darker, more complicated nightmare at wor...k. Narrated and produced by Aaron Mahnke, with writing by GennaRose Nethercott, research by Cassandra de Alba, and music by Chad Lawson. ————————— Lore Resources: Episode Music: lorepodcast.com/music Episode Sources: lorepodcast.com/sources Official Lore Merchandise: lorepodcast.com/shop All the shows from Grim & Mild: www.grimandmild.com ————————— Sponsors: MeUndies: Slide into game changing comfort with MeUndies. Get up to 50% off at MeUndies.com/lore with the promo code LORE. 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 50% off a new SimpliSafe system. ————————— To report a concern regarding a radio-style, non-Aaron ad in this episode, reach out to ads @ lorepodcast.com with the name of the company or organization so we can look into it. ————————— To advertise on this podcast please email: ad-sales@libsyn.com. Or go to: https://advertising.libsyn.com/lore ————————— ©2025 Aaron Mahnke. All rights reserved.
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                                        In the dream, Arsony was attending a great feast.
                                         
                                        The table was laden with dishes and delicacies, breads and meats and bubbling libations,
                                         
                                        a spread, fit for a king.
                                         
                                        But most royal of all, well, that would be the main course,
                                         
                                        a food known only as the king's hand.
                                         
                                        Now, the king's hand was no dish known to the waking world.
                                         
                                        It existed only in Arsonie's dream, and when the 28-year-old awoke, he became haunted
                                         
                                        by the idea of bringing this subconscious culinary creation to life, which, unfortunately,
                                         
    
                                        is exactly what he did.
                                         
                                        And I say unfortunately, because the king's hand of Arsenae's dream feast just so happened
                                         
                                        to be a hollow, hand-shaped M&M cookie stuffed with a Greek salad.
                                         
                                        Through a series of increasingly deranged viral tweets,
                                         
                                        Arsenae documented his journey to create a real-life king's hand.
                                         
                                        Did he have baking experience?
                                         
                                        Well, not particularly.
                                         
                                        Did his friends and family approve of this venture?
                                         
    
                                        Definitely not.
                                         
                                        But that didn't stop him from creating a silicone hand-shaped mold,
                                         
                                        pressing cookie dough into the crevices,
                                         
                                        and ultimately filling the entire accursed concoction
                                         
                                        with lettuce, olives, and feta cheese.
                                         
                                        He said,
                                         
                                        It's hard for me to tell you how King's Hand tasted.
                                         
                                        I dreamed it up in my dreams,
                                         
    
                                        so when I bit into it, it was very rewarding.
                                         
                                        I was like, oh my God, I'm eating my dream food.
                                         
                                        If another person were to bite into King's hand, they would barf.
                                         
                                        I don't know.
                                         
                                        And look, the world of dreams is a mysterious one.
                                         
                                        Sometimes our visions make sense.
                                         
                                        Sometimes they don't.
                                         
                                        But no matter how strange or nightmarish,
                                         
    
                                        we can usually reassure ourselves not to worry because dreams aren't real. At least they shouldn't
                                         
                                        be. But like the king's hand of the 2020 internet, some slumbering monstrosities managed to claw
                                         
                                        their way right out of our heads and into the bright, waking world. I'm Aaron Mankey,
                                         
                                        and this is lore.
                                         
                                        If you're like me, you've probably kept a dream journal at some point in your life.
                                         
                                        And while the idea may seem modern, the practice of writing down one's dreams is actually very ancient.
                                         
                                        In fact, the oldest surviving dream journal was written in the second century AD by a Roman writer named Aristides.
                                         
                                        Apparently, he got the idea after a god appeared to him in his sleep and told him to start chronicling
                                         
    
                                        dreams, most of which ended up being medical tips and tricks from the gods themselves.
                                         
                                        Meanwhile, others have been found elsewhere from ancient Rome to medieval Japan.
                                         
                                        One Japanese Buddhist monk named Miyawa dutifully recorded his dreams from the 1190s
                                         
                                        all the way until his death in 1232.
                                         
                                        And sure, some of these dreams concerned spiritual matters, as is befitting a monk,
                                         
                                        but others have a certain randomness that feels strangely relatable.
                                         
                                        In the ocean, there was a large fish.
                                         
                                        he wrote in one entry, and someone said,
                                         
    
                                        it is a crocodile.
                                         
                                        It had a single horn growing and was about ten feet long.
                                         
                                        In another entry, I pulled down a double-branched peach limb and picked a peach.
                                         
                                        It was not an ordinary peach, but a marvelously rare, hitherto unseen peach.
                                         
                                        Its white fuzz was about three inches long.
                                         
                                        It was shaped like a hand.
                                         
                                        And let me be clear that, coming off of the king's hand story,
                                         
                                        I'm not sure if it's comforting or upsetting that we've been dreaming about weird
                                         
    
                                        edible hands for nearly a thousand years.
                                         
                                        Someone should probably look into that.
                                         
                                        And speaking of mysterious imagery,
                                         
                                        people haven't just been writing down their dreams since ancient times.
                                         
                                        We've also been trying to interpret them.
                                         
                                        Take this confident advice from a 15th century BC Babylonian tablet,
                                         
                                        which insists that, and I quote,
                                         
                                        if he bites his upper lip,
                                         
    
                                        joy will not be given him.
                                         
                                        If a hunchback seizes him, a curse will smite him.
                                         
                                        If he carries beer in the street, his heart will be glad.
                                         
                                        Later on during the second century AD, Greek scholar Artemidorus
                                         
                                        claimed that plain handball predicts, and I quote,
                                         
                                        endless quarrels and frequently love for a cortisn.
                                         
                                        While dreaming that you're covered in hogs bristles,
                                         
                                        portends a similarly bristly violent future.
                                         
    
                                        And let's not forget this particularly essential analysis,
                                         
                                        in which Artemidora states, and I quote,
                                         
                                        flat cakes prepared without cheese are good,
                                         
                                        Cakes that have cheese in them signify deceit and trickery.
                                         
                                        Dreams of cheese also have the same meaning.
                                         
                                        And as a lactose intolerant individual, I feel you, Artemidorus, I feel you.
                                         
                                        Over the years, dreams have been viewed as everything from divine messages and demonic influence
                                         
                                        to artistic inspiration and magical prophecy.
                                         
    
                                        Dreams have been used to justify controversial decisions, conjure up medical diagnoses,
                                         
                                        and even predict the future.
                                         
                                        And let's just say, it wasn't long before one group started to become suspicious of this
                                         
                                        spooky otherworldy information that citizens received every night while they slept.
                                         
                                        That is, the Catholic Church.
                                         
                                        Beginning in the Middle Ages, the church began regarding dream interpretation as dangerous.
                                         
                                        Some dreams were sinful, or even sacrilegious, for one.
                                         
                                        Plus, reading the symbols in dreams was a little too witchy for their liking.
                                         
    
                                        Philosophers weren't stoked about the whole thing either, largely.
                                         
                                        regarding dreams as nothing but nonsense and superstition.
                                         
                                        And it might have gone on this way, if not for a certain Austrian neurologist who came
                                         
                                        onto the scene in the late 1800s.
                                         
                                        I'm speaking, of course, about Sigmund Freud.
                                         
                                        Freud, you see, had begun his medical career studying psychiatric disorders, specifically
                                         
                                        what was then called hysteria.
                                         
                                        But in 1895, he found himself gravitating toward another field of study.
                                         
    
                                        Dreams.
                                         
                                        He himself had a dream about a patient he was treating, which upon a person,
                                         
                                        waking, he realized, was his brain's way of processing his feelings around the case,
                                         
                                        feelings that's until the dream he didn't even realize he had. And this made him wonder,
                                         
                                        what if our dreams are more than random scenes? What if they are a window into our subconscious
                                         
                                        minds? As he delved deeper and deeper into the study of dreams, he concluded that dreams
                                         
                                        weren't random at all, but blends of a dreamer's memories, experiences, and thoughts. Often they
                                         
                                        served as wish fulfillment, and, well, Freud being Freud, he also tended to insist that
                                         
    
                                        dreaming of pretty much anything that was longer than it was wide symbolized something phallic.
                                         
                                        Now, today, Freud is basically synonymous with dream analysis, but his landmark 1899 book,
                                         
                                        The Interpretation of Dreams, was kind of a flop in its day. It only sold a few hundred
                                         
                                        copies during its first six years in print, but even so, it slowly gained acclaim. And before
                                         
                                        long, Freud had transformed the study of dreaming into a respected academic pursuit.
                                         
                                        And of course, he wasn't the only one driving this dream machine.
                                         
                                        Freud's contemporary Carl Jung also put stock in dream analysis, but not quite in the way
                                         
                                        Freud did.
                                         
    
                                        You see, Jung didn't believe dreams represented an individual's subconscious at all.
                                         
                                        No, instead, they were gateways into what he called the collective unconscious.
                                         
                                        Consider, Jung suggested, how so many people have such similar dreams.
                                         
                                        dreams of flying, of falling, of being chased by animals, or finding ourselves naked in public,
                                         
                                        all motifs, by the way, that also tend to appear in folklore and fairy tales.
                                         
                                        To Jung, this pointed to a much more groundbreaking idea,
                                         
                                        that there is a vast reservoir of shared memories, shared symbols, and shared stories
                                         
                                        that all of humanity is tapped into, and through our dreams, that collective unconsciousness
                                         
    
                                        can be accessed.
                                         
                                        Now, don't get me wrong, he didn't think those dreams.
                                         
                                        meant the same thing to every dreamer. And he wasn't a big fan of those cheesy dictionaries of
                                         
                                        dream symbols, known as the cipher method. And neither was Freud, for that matter. After all,
                                         
                                        a ring in a wedding dream versus a ring in a dream about the Lord of the Rings probably have
                                         
                                        different meanings. And if the dreamer is a jeweler, well, that could mean something different
                                         
                                        altogether. In other words, context matters. But hey, that sure hasn't stopped dream symbol
                                         
                                        books from flying off the printing presses. Heck, in the 19th and 20th centuries, dream books
                                         
    
                                        even told you what lottery numbers to play based on what images appeared in your dreams.
                                         
                                        Today, countless books, websites, and even apps for your phone claim to be able to tell you
                                         
                                        what your dreams mean. And while that would certainly be convenient, the truth is no single key
                                         
                                        can unlock the meaning of our dreams. And yet, what if those dreams can unlock something very real?
                                         
                                        Inside of us.
                                         
                                        You may have heard the oft-repeated bit of trivia that a dream was responsible for the invention of the sewing machine.
                                         
                                        As the story goes, the year was 1844, an American inventor Elias Howe was growing increasingly frustrated at his consistent failure to invent a machine with the capability of stitching technology.
                                         
                                        styles together, so frustrated in fact that it manifested in a doozy of a stress dream.
                                         
    
                                        Elias had dreamt that he was in the courts of a cannibal king. The king told him that he had
                                         
                                        24 hours to invent the sewing machine or else. Elias frantically got to work, but despite his
                                         
                                        efforts, 24 hours came and went, and still no sewing machine. So the cannibals tied him up and
                                         
                                        dumped him into a cauldron of water. He tried to wriggle out of the pot, of course, but whenever
                                         
                                        he rose up, the cannibals pushed him back in with their spears, spears that, oddly, all had
                                         
                                        holes in their points. When Elias woke, he was shaken up, but he also couldn't get the thought
                                         
                                        of those spears out of his head. And suddenly he realized the missing element of his sewing
                                         
                                        machine design. He should put a hole at the bottom of the needle rather than at the top. And
                                         
    
                                        that was that. Elias Howe's machine changed the textile industry forever, and his needle
                                         
                                        configuration is still used to this day. It's a heck of a story, and it's pretty widely
                                         
                                        told, too. But, well, it turns out this textile tale is probably fabricated. No pun intended,
                                         
                                        I swear. You see, the first reference that we could find to it comes from a much reprinted
                                         
                                        1894 newspaper article in which the story is told by a James M. Howe. In the article, published
                                         
                                        30 years after Elias Howe's death, mind you, James claims to be a descendant of Elias and insists the
                                         
                                        cannibal dream was passed down as family lore. Now, it might have been easy to accept the
                                         
                                        article at face value at the time, but we took a deep dive into Elias Howe's genealogical
                                         
    
                                        record, and it turns out there is no one even remotely related to Elias Howe with the name
                                         
                                        James M. Howe, let alone a direct descendant. But hey, as satisfying as it is to get to the
                                         
                                        bottom of a rumor, it is a little disappointing, right? I mean, that's the kind of story that
                                         
                                        you really want to be true. But don't worry. The sewing
                                         
                                        may not have been dreamed up, but there are plenty of famous breakthroughs that really were.
                                         
                                        Take, for example, this case from the mid-1950s. A prominent cartoonist was in a rut,
                                         
                                        his life was in shambles, his marriage was falling apart, and on top of all of that,
                                         
                                        his nights had become plagued by horrible dreams. There was one that he later wrote,
                                         
    
                                        where I was in a kind of tower made up of a series of ramps. Dead leaves were falling and
                                         
                                        covering everything. At a particular moment in an immaculately white alcove, a white skeleton
                                         
                                        appeared that tried to catch me, and then instantly everything around me became white.
                                         
                                        It got so bad that this cartoonist visited a psychologist, who advised him to take a step back
                                         
                                        from his work, that is, to stop drawing cartoons. Instead, the cartoonist did just the opposite.
                                         
                                        He began drafting cartoons set in the snowy, all-white landscape that he had seen in his dreams,
                                         
                                        and even incorporated dreaming into the plot.
                                         
                                        That cartoonist, by the way, was Erge, creator of Tintin,
                                         
    
                                        and the work inspired by the nightmare was Tintin in Tibet,
                                         
                                        often lauded as his finest work.
                                         
                                        And then there's the scientist Otto Lowy,
                                         
                                        who awoke in the night on Easter Sunday in 1920
                                         
                                        to jot down an idea he'd had in a dream.
                                         
                                        Come morning, he eagerly went to read it,
                                         
                                        certain that he had dreamed up something important,
                                         
                                        only to be unable to decipher his messy handwriting.
                                         
    
                                        Luckily, though, the dream returned to the following night, and this time he remembered it all.
                                         
                                        It was the design of an experiment, he wrote, to determine whether or not the hypothesis of chemical
                                         
                                        transmission that I had uttered 17 years ago was correct. I got up immediately, went to the laboratory
                                         
                                        and performed a simple experiment on a frog heart according to the nocturnal design.
                                         
                                        Following the dream's instructions, he stimulated the vagus nerve of a still beating frog heart,
                                         
                                        and lo and behold, it behaved just as it had in his dream, with the heartbeat slowing down.
                                         
                                        Then he applied some of the salt solutions surrounding that heart to a second, also beating heart,
                                         
                                        and just like in the dream, that one slowed down as well.
                                         
    
                                        Sixteen years later, after a decade and a half of perfecting his research in collaboration
                                         
                                        with his lifelong friend and fellow scientist Henry Dale,
                                         
                                        Otto Lowy and Henry Dale would win the Nobel Prize for their groundbreaking work on nerve cell communication,
                                         
                                        which forever changed our understanding of our sympathetic nervous system,
                                         
                                        all because of a dream.
                                         
                                        Now, one might argue that when it comes to experiences like these,
                                         
                                        there might be nothing paranormal about it.
                                         
                                        After all, this could simply be the dreamer's subconscious minds
                                         
    
                                        offering up ideas that would have bubbled to the surface eventually.
                                         
                                        But what does it mean when someone dreams up a solution to a problem
                                         
                                        that they never could have solved by themselves?
                                         
                                        Today they are known as the lost children of the Alleghenies,
                                         
                                        but back of the 1850s, they were simply George and Joseph Cox.
                                         
                                        Little Joseph, five years old, and George, seven, lived with their two younger sisters and
                                         
                                        their parents, Samuel and Susanna, in a cabin nestled among the trees of Pennsylvania's Allegheny
                                         
                                        mountains. And for the Cox family, April 24th of 1856 began as a morning like any other.
                                         
    
                                        First, the household sat down to breakfast together. Then the kid's father set out hunting
                                         
                                        while their mother began the household chores. I imagine that she was relieved when she noticed
                                         
                                        George and Joseph had left the house to go hunting with their father. After all, it's not easy
                                         
                                        to do housework with four children under the age of eight running from room to room.
                                         
                                        But come lunchtime when her husband returned from the forest, that really was a little bit of
                                         
                                        leaf turned to panic because the boys weren't with him. In fact, they had never joined him
                                         
                                        hunting at all that day. They had simply walked out the door, stepped into the woods, and
                                         
                                        disappeared. It was a frigid April in the mountains, and a light snow had begun to fall. Miles of
                                         
    
                                        woods stretched out in all directions, wild with thickets and gnarled trees, and dusk was mere hours away.
                                         
                                        Desperately Samuel ran to the nearby town of Pavia to rustle up a search party, and soon a group
                                         
                                        of townsfolk and dogs had set out into the forest, torches and lanterns ablaze.
                                         
                                        By nightfall, more than a hundred people had joined the search.
                                         
                                        Some stayed in the woods all night, lighting signal fires in hopes that the lost boys would
                                         
                                        see them, but daylight came and the children were still nowhere to be found.
                                         
                                        The following day, more searchers joined, and the day after that, and the day after that.
                                         
                                        Hour after terrible hour, the brothers' names were called into the pitiless woods without
                                         
    
                                        response, like Will Buyers from Stranger Things. Businesses closed and chores were neglected as
                                         
                                        more and more people banded together in the search. All told, some 2,000 people participated in the
                                         
                                        hunt. But to no avail, George and Joseph Cox seemed to have vanished into thin air.
                                         
                                        Now, by this point, folks were beginning to get suspicious. Gossip gripped the small community,
                                         
                                        rumors that the boys had been murdered, that their own parents had done the awful deed. A mob eventually
                                         
                                        overtook the Cox house, digging up the yard, and prying up the floorboards, but nothing was
                                         
                                        found. Meanwhile, little did they know, 12 miles away, a farmer named Jacob Dibert was conducting
                                         
                                        a search party of his own, deep asleep in his own bed. Dibert dreamt that he was walking
                                         
    
                                        through unfamiliar woods, looking for the famous missing boys. Stepping up onto a fallen log,
                                         
                                        he saw a dead deer lying on the ground, and following its trail he came upon a single child's
                                         
                                        shoe, and next a fallen beech tree lying over a stream which he used to cross as a bridge.
                                         
                                        On the other side, after clambering over a stony ridge into a ravine with a small brook
                                         
                                        running through it, he finally reached his destination, a massive broken birch tree with ropey,
                                         
                                        tangled roots, and cradled in those roots as if asleep, lay two tiny corpses.
                                         
                                        The next night the dream returned, and the night after that.
                                         
                                        Each time it was the same, passing the dead deer, crossing the dead deer, crossing the small.
                                         
    
                                        the stream to a fallen tree, and finally discovering the bodies of the Cox children.
                                         
                                        After having this dream for the third time, Dibert told his brother-in-law Harrison Wysong about
                                         
                                        it, and with some skepticism, the men set out into the woods. It was only five minutes before
                                         
                                        they came upon the body of a deer. Eight yards farther, they found a child's shoe. All but running
                                         
                                        now, Wysong and Dibert crossed a stream via a fallen tree and scrambled over the rocky ridge
                                         
                                        into the ravine, and when Dybert saw a massive broken birch tree looming before them,
                                         
                                        all he could do was point, for curled at the foot of the birch, or the bodies of Joseph and
                                         
                                        George Cox. It appeared the children had died of exposure, lost in the icy woods.
                                         
    
                                        Although the discovery was a tragic one, it ended the finger-pointing that had ravaged the town
                                         
                                        and granted the boy's bereaved parents much-needed closure. On May 8th, the children were buried
                                         
                                        in a joint grave in Mount Union Cemetery, where you can visit them to this day.
                                         
                                        And that's the story as it's been told and retold for a century and a half,
                                         
                                        so commonly accepted as fact that the community even erected a monument to the children
                                         
                                        in 1906, which is still there and marked with a sign informing the public about Jacob
                                         
                                        Dibert and his dream. The Wikipedia page for the Lost Children also presents the story as
                                         
                                        fact, just as I've told it to you. Heck, musician Alison Krause even wrote a song about it.
                                         
    
                                        But hold on, because our trusty researcher Cassandra is about to crush some of those dreams,
                                         
                                        literally. Digging deep, and I mean deep into this story, she found that there is only one report
                                         
                                        from May of 1856 that mentions anything about a dream at all. And oddly, it isn't dibert at all,
                                         
                                        but why song who allegedly dreamt of the children's whereabouts? But that's all it says. No
                                         
                                        about a deer, a shoe, or even a tree. A year later, in 1857, a writer named C. Jeffreys
                                         
                                        published a 50-page book attributing the dream to divert, but the supposedly factual document
                                         
                                        includes numerous conversations that the author couldn't possibly have been privy to.
                                         
                                        Oh, and speaking of facts, he does cite a source article from the Altoona Tribune as evidence,
                                         
    
                                        but that article, well, it turns out it's actually an advertisement for the very same C. Jeffreys
                                         
                                        book. And the game of telephone continues. In 1888, another account blatantly plagiarizing Jeffreys
                                         
                                        added the details of the dead deer in the child's shoe. And so it goes. Article after article,
                                         
                                        book after book, the story warped and reformed until it became impossible to tell how much was real
                                         
                                        and how much was nothing but a dream.
                                         
                                        Tracking history is a little like sleepwalking.
                                         
                                        You're stumbling through the dark, assuming the path ahead is clear, but suddenly you found
                                         
                                        yourself colliding with a wall.
                                         
    
                                        Here is what is true.
                                         
                                        George and Joseph Cox vanished in the woods on April 24th of 1856.
                                         
                                        Their bodies were found days later by Jason Diburts and Harrison Wysong.
                                         
                                        But whether dreams had anything to do with it, well, that's where the facts grow thin.
                                         
                                        Most of our dreams occur during REM sleep, a time when the emotional centers of the brain
                                         
                                        kick into overdrive, while the parts concerned with rationality, logic, and decision-making
                                         
                                        take a little rest, and the result?
                                         
                                        The perfect mental environment for some wild, high-emotion visions with no common sense
                                         
    
                                        to keep them in check.
                                         
                                        But if our dreams are all emotion and no logic, then how are we supposed to explain the phenomenon
                                         
                                        of precognitive dreams?
                                         
                                        Well, according to one theory called Next Up, aka Network Exploration to Understand Possibilities,
                                         
                                        your dreaming brain deliberately creates a rapid-fire collection of scenarios
                                         
                                        that you might encounter in waking life as a sort of training ground for the future.
                                         
                                        Because your dreams are attempting to predict what you might experience down the line,
                                         
                                        it makes sense that sometimes one of those predictions might actually happen.
                                         
    
                                        On the other hand, predictive dreams might simply come down to statistics.
                                         
                                        The average person is believed to have roughly four dreams per night, and, well, multiply that
                                         
                                        by every night in your life, and that's a pretty good set of odds that one or two of those
                                         
                                        dream scenes might line up with something in the real world.
                                         
                                        And then, of course, there's a case like the lost children of the Alleghenies, in which
                                         
                                        the dream wasn't manufactured in the sleeping mind at all, but in the rumor mill.
                                         
                                        So why then would a story like theirs even develop?
                                         
                                        Why claim a dream led the men to find the lost children rather than to tell it plainly?
                                         
    
                                        Well, if I had to venture a guess, I would say it has less to do with the merits of dreams
                                         
                                        and more to do with the failures of men.
                                         
                                        You see, before Dibert and Weissong, not one of the 2000 searchers thought to cross the stream
                                         
                                        in their hunt for the boys.
                                         
                                        They assumed that the spring waters were too high for the children to possibly have crossed
                                         
                                        an assumption that likely cost the children their lives.
                                         
                                        Such a simple mistake, with such devastating consequences.
                                         
                                        devastating enough perhaps that the searchers grasped for a supernatural reason for their failure
                                         
    
                                        rather than bear the guilt of the truth, that they simply hadn't looked hard enough.
                                         
                                        I hope you've enjoyed this chance to be. I hope you've enjoyed this chance
                                         
                                        to put some of history's sleepiest rumors to bed.
                                         
                                        And if you aren't tired yet,
                                         
                                        I have one last story of a magical dreamer
                                         
                                        to offer before we give tonight's episode a rest.
                                         
                                        And this one is a little closer to home than usual.
                                         
                                        Stick around through this brief sponsor break
                                         
    
                                        to hear all about it.
                                         
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                                        They say that when Kathleen Hines was born, the nurse took one look at her and fainted in horror.
                                         
    
                                        And to be fair, you might have too.
                                         
                                        Despite ten working fingers and ten working toes, something vital was missing.
                                         
                                        The baby, you see, didn't have a face.
                                         
                                        At least, that's what the poor nurse thought at first.
                                         
                                        In truth, little Kathleen's face was simply obscured by a thin, fleshy membrane called
                                         
                                        a call, a veil of skin that occurs in roughly one out of 80,000.
                                         
                                        births. But while the call was quickly removed, revealing a healthy baby beneath, it was far from
                                         
                                        forgotten. You see, Kathleen Heinz, maiden name Kathleen Allworth, was born in 1934 in Portchester,
                                         
    
                                        New York, to a pair of off-the-boat Irish Catholic immigrants. And as such, the Alworths clung tight
                                         
                                        to the beliefs and superstitions of their homeland. Among them, the notion that children born with
                                         
                                        a call are destined to be cursed with a second sight. Not wanting to frighten their daughter, Kathleen's
                                         
                                        parents kept the circumstances of her birth a secret until she reached the age of 13.
                                         
                                        And for a while, she seemed like a normal kid.
                                         
                                        She spent her days running around Port Chester with her six siblings,
                                         
                                        getting into mischief and helping her parents around the house.
                                         
                                        But when she turned 22, Kathleen's life changed forever.
                                         
    
                                        That is, she got married.
                                         
                                        Suddenly, she was forced to move five towns away, leaving her tight-knit family for the first time.
                                         
                                        And it was there, estranged from her loved ones, that she began
                                         
                                        having some rather weird dreams.
                                         
                                        First, she saw her sister Nora
                                         
                                        wracked with sorrow while walking
                                         
                                        through a church filled with white lilies.
                                         
                                        Upon waking, Kathleen tried to shake
                                         
    
                                        the dream off as just that, a dream.
                                         
                                        But hey, better, safe than sorry, she figured,
                                         
                                        especially given the fact that her sister
                                         
                                        was nine months pregnant,
                                         
                                        and so she gave her a ring.
                                         
                                        Not wanting to totally freak Nora out,
                                         
                                        she casually asked how the pregnancy was going,
                                         
                                        to which Nora responded cheerfully that all was well.
                                         
    
                                        And it was, until the very next morning.
                                         
                                        when Nora gave birth to a stillborn child.
                                         
                                        It was spooky, but probably just a coincidence, right?
                                         
                                        Well, unfortunately for Kathleen, that would be far from the last time her dreams would
                                         
                                        portend of family members' death.
                                         
                                        Take for example how before a trip to Niagara Falls, Kathleen dreamt of four men standing
                                         
                                        around a coffin.
                                         
                                        One of them turned to her and recognizing him, she realized that the men were none other
                                         
    
                                        than her four brothers, the caskets occupant, her father.
                                         
                                        Once again, she tried to brush the dream aside and left for her trip.
                                         
                                        But one morning around 7 a.m., she awoke with a start in her hotel bed,
                                         
                                        only to find her father standing in the corner of the room.
                                         
                                        But this wasn't the father she knew.
                                         
                                        No, here he looked to be in his mid-30s, youthful with Auburn hair.
                                         
                                        And then he spoke, I've come, the man said, to say goodbye.
                                         
                                        With that, he vanished, and the telephone began to ring.
                                         
    
                                        Bleary with sleep, Kathleen answered the phone, only to hear her brother's heartbroken voice
                                         
                                        informing her that her father had just passed away.
                                         
                                        As she progressed through adulthood, the terrible prophetic dreams grew more and more frequent.
                                         
                                        In one case, she awoke suddenly in the night with a severe pain in her arm, which she apparently
                                         
                                        had been holding outstretched in her sleep.
                                         
                                        Little did she know, only minutes later, she and her husband would receive a call telling
                                         
                                        them that her husband's brother had died. How did he die, you might ask? Well, by sudden heart
                                         
                                        attack, while complaining of arm pain with his arm outstretched. But there was one dream that
                                         
    
                                        plagued her more often than any of the others. I like to call it planes, trains, and automobiles
                                         
                                        ESP edition. You see, for years, Kathleen Hines had this recurring dream in which she and a living
                                         
                                        family member would be on a casual stroll when an airplane would zoom down and land beside them.
                                         
                                        out from the cockpit would pop an already deceased member of the family who would generously offer
                                         
                                        them a ride. Kathleen, knowing a suspicious situation when she saw one, would always decline,
                                         
                                        and sure, the ghost driver would mix it up now and then pulling up in a car or a train,
                                         
                                        or even sometimes a boat, but Kathleen wasn't about to be fooled, and usually neither were her
                                         
                                        companions. Now, I say usually, because, well, on at least two different occasions,
                                         
    
                                        things went a little differently. That is, her living companion in the dream,
                                         
                                        accepted the invitation, bid Kathleen goodbye, and zoomed away with the deceased, and I probably
                                         
                                        don't need to tell you what happened after that. That's right, within six months, that person
                                         
                                        would be dead. In fact, she foresaw her aforementioned sister Nora's death in this very
                                         
                                        same way. By her mid-30s, Kathleen was so frightened by her second sight that she tried to push it
                                         
                                        from her mind altogether. If she had an odd feeling or a dream, she would desperately attempt to
                                         
                                        ignore it, determined to leave old Irish folklore behind. And it's easy to see why, right?
                                         
                                        Death in the family is always tragic enough. But to see it ahead of time and be powerless
                                         
    
                                        to stop it, that's a nightmare. When asked in an interview if she believed these abilities had a
                                         
                                        purpose, she said, so I can protect my family, warn them. But that's never how it went, was it?
                                         
                                        She'd simply foresee a tragedy and be forced to stand by and watch it play out. Now, I won't claim to
                                         
                                        have an explanation for Kathleen's experiences. Perhaps she genuinely did have some inexplicable ability
                                         
                                        to see into the future, or perhaps it was merely confirmation bias. After all, she could have had
                                         
                                        other ominous dreams easily forgotten when they didn't come to fruition. Add that to the fact
                                         
                                        that she grew up steeped in Irish folklore and knowledge of a call, and it's easy to see how she
                                         
                                        might have gotten swept up in the superstition. But honestly, I don't think finding an explanation matters,
                                         
    
                                        because to me this story is about something else entirely.
                                         
                                        Let's think back to when all this started.
                                         
                                        Kathleen had just gotten married and moved away from home.
                                         
                                        She went from spending every moment with her big Irish family,
                                         
                                        bickering and telling wild stories and getting into trouble, yes,
                                         
                                        but also taking care of one another,
                                         
                                        making sure the family was safe and loved,
                                         
                                        and suddenly she was far away from them for the first time in her life,
                                         
    
                                        which was when she began to dream about them.
                                         
                                        Maybe second sight is real.
                                         
                                        Maybe not.
                                         
                                        Undeniably real, though, is the story of a young woman feeling estranged from her loved ones and her heritage
                                         
                                        and struggling to feel connected to them at any distance, even through death.
                                         
                                        Kathleen was 77 years old when an ethnology student at the University of Edinburgh interviewed her at length about her dreams.
                                         
                                        And throughout the course of their conversation, she repeatedly slipped into unrelated memories,
                                         
                                        the chaos that ensued when offering a box of chocolate to a full room of seven Owlworth children,
                                         
    
                                        the adventures she went on when she finally visited Ireland,
                                         
                                        the mischief that she and Nora used to get up within their youth.
                                         
                                        We were real sisters, she said.
                                         
                                        We were close as you could get, right up until the bitter end.
                                         
                                        The most important thing is family.
                                         
                                        Remember that.
                                         
                                        Oh, and speaking of family, that ethnology student in Edinburgh,
                                         
                                        that was our very own generous Nethercote.
                                         
    
                                        who wrote the words that I've been speaking to you today,
                                         
                                        archiving the experiences of her great-a-a-a-a-aul-Worth.
                                         
                                        And that beloved sister, Nora Alworth,
                                         
                                        well, that was Jenna Rose's grandmother.
                                         
                                        Even as an old woman,
                                         
                                        Kathleen Hines still struggled to keep her premonitions at bay.
                                         
                                        I don't want this to follow me my whole life,
                                         
                                        she told Jenna Rose over the phone.
                                         
    
                                        Plus, I'll be meeting the Lord soon enough,
                                         
                                        and I don't want him to be mad.
                                         
                                        Kathleen passed away in June of 2019,
                                         
                                        and I have a feeling,
                                         
                                        that the Lord wasn't too mad. From all accounts, she was a pretty lovely lady. But Jenna Rose and
                                         
                                        I do have one last lingering question. Before she died, do you think one last airplane landed
                                         
                                        in her dreams? To which Kathleen finally answered, yes, I'm ready. Let's go for a ride.
                                         
                                        This episode of lore was produced by me, Aaron Manky, with writing by Jenna Rose Nethercats,
                                         
    
                                        research by Cassandra Day Alba, and music by Chad Lawson.
                                         
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