Lore - REMASTERED – Episode 17: Broken Fingernails

Episode Date: December 13, 2021

It’s never a bad time to revisit this classic episode about graveyards and the folklore around them. Complete with fresh narration, a new soundtrack, and modern production, plus a brand new bonus episode at the end.  ———————— Lore Resources:  Episode Music: lorepodcast.com/music  Episode Sources: lorepodcast.com/sources  All the shows from Grim & Mild: www.grimandmild.com Access premium content! To advertise on our podcast, please reach out to [e-mail], or visit our listing here.

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It's the final chance we have to say what needs said or do what needs done in order to honor the ones we've lost. So while the methods and purpose behind these rituals can vary drastically from one culture to the next, one thing is common among the vast majority. The burial. We bury our dead. We've done it for an incredibly long time, and we've gotten very good at it. Every year, archaeologists open new tombs that date back millennia, each one teaching

us something new about the cultures that time has caused us to forget. And central to each of these discoveries is the burial itself. The techniques, the beliefs, the ritual. But it's not just about the dead. The practice of honoring and burying our loved ones is just as much about our own feelings of loss and grief as it is about our responsibility to care for those who have passed away. No place personifies the act of burial more than the local cemetery. With their green lawns and neat rows of pale stones, the graveyard is unique among urban

constructions. They are respectfully avoided by some and obsessed over by others. But whatever beliefs you might hold to or opinions you might have about them, graveyards are a special place. Stephen King explores the allure and power of the graveyard in his novel Pet Cemetery. In his story, the cemetery is a portal between our world and another. It's a place of transformation, of transition, and of mystery. And while we might not be digging shallow graves for our pets in hopes that they'll

return to us in the night, we've never lost our fascination with those places. Cemeteries have always been seen as the end of the journey. Whether you believe in heaven or not, the graveyard is where most of us will go when our time is up. For some, however, the story doesn't always end there. Some things, it seems. Can't be buried. I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore.

For a very long time, burial in Europe was limited to churchyards. It made sense. With a vast majority of Europeans holding to the Christian faith, all of them wanted to be buried close to their place of worship. Politics held sway, even in those quiet, humble places of burial, though. Throughout Europe, it was common to find cemeteries that separated Protestant and Catholic graves. There's a touching example of this near the Dutch town of Rermond, where a couple was buried in the late 1800s.

The husband had been Protestant, while the wife held to the Catholic faith. Despite strict rules regarding their burial, the couple managed to cheat the system by picking graves on opposite sides of the dividing wall. Their tall headstones each included carved hands that reached out to touch each other. Economic status played a part in burial as well. Those wealthy enough could purchase space inside the church itself, while the less well-off had to settle for graves outside the church walls. And even then, social status determined where in the yard a person might be buried.

The higher the status, the closer to the chapel. But no one wanted to find themselves in the north corner. That was where people of uncertain birth, strangers from out of town, and stillborn infants were all buried. But churches filled up fast, as did the yards around them. As the population of Europe swelled, space began to disappear at an alarming rate. At first, graves were simply moved closer together, like the parking lot at your local mall.

Smaller spaces meant more occupants, and that was good for business. But it only worked for a while. After that, they started stacking coffins on top of one another, opting for the vertical approach. But this meant that the churchyards were literally rising in elevation as earth was filled in between the growing graves, sometimes as high as 20 feet. Grave Friars Cemetery in Edinburgh, Scotland is a horrific example of this problem. It used to be a depression in the ground, but over time it's become more of a hill.

With more than half a million recorded burials, the elevation has literally risen over 15 feet, introducing problems that are unique to a graveyard so old and so full. According to reports, there's such a high concentration of human remains there that on especially rainy days, remnants that aren't sealed within a casket, have a tendency to float to the surface, bursting through the mud, like white teeth. All of this left cities in need of some serious creative thinking. In some places, the solution they chose was a drastic one. In France, for example, the government actually had to step in.

Churchyards had gotten so full that they would often collapse outward, spilling soil and human remains onto the streets. Walls were built around them, but they rarely worked. The dead were getting out of hand, so to speak. In 1786, they removed all the bodies from Holy Innocence Cemetery in Paris and moved them to a series of unused stone quarries that became known as the catacombs. Today it's estimated that the catacombs hold close to 6 million bodies. Sometimes though, it wasn't a lack of space that ruined a cemetery, but a lack of popularity.

That's the fate that awaited the cemetery built on the former property of Sir William Ashhurst in the north end of London. Named for the small hilltop community that once existed there, Highgate Cemetery was established on the grounds of the Old Manor House, which had been demolished and replaced with a church in 1839. At first, the cemetery was very popular. Karl Marx is buried there, as are many relatives of Charles Dickens and Dante Rosetti. But when the owners lost money and fell on hard times, the graveyard was left to the

elements. Monuments and crypts became overgrown with vegetation, and sometimes trees would sprout up right through the graves themselves. Highgate is a wonderful example of what we all imagine a haunted cemetery might look like. Filmmakers and authors have been drawn to it for decades, tapping into its arresting visual atmosphere to create works of Gothic horror and fantasy. It was even the inspiration behind Neil Gaiman's beautiful novel, The Graveyard Book.

But while there are plenty of stories about the history of graveyards throughout Europe and America, cemeteries have always been known for something darker, something less tangible than what we can see above ground. Perhaps it's all those neat rows of bone-white headstones, or the notion that hundreds of bodies lay waiting beneath our feet. Whatever the reason, it's in the local graveyard more than any other place that we find rumors of the otherworldly and unexplainable. Inside those walls, between the pale stones and dark trees, almost everyone has heard

tales of those who refuse to stay in the grave. Should or not, sometimes the past is too traumatic to leave us alone. Just south of Chicago, between the curving arms of I-80 and I-294 is a graveyard known for a level of activity unusual in a place of the dead. It's said that the famous gangster Al Capone used to use the pond nearby as a dumping place for the bodies of those he killed. Other rumors make reference to the satanic rituals and meetings that have taken place in the graveyard over the years.

But there are those who swear they have seen unusual things there. The most famous sighting has been called the White Lady, the ghostly image of a woman that was said to appear only during a full moon. In 1991, the Chicago Sun-Times featured a photo of the White Lady on the front cover taken by a researcher on one of her visits. The woman appears to be semi-transparent, sitting on a tombstone near the trees and dressed in white. Other visitors have seen glowing orbs, apparitions, and even vehicles and a farmhouse that seem

to fade in and out of existence. The site is off-limits to visitors now, but it's remained a favorite haunt, no pun intended, of ghost hunters across the country. In 1863, an outbreak of smallpox moved through a Civil War POW camp in Columbus, Ohio. The camp held close to 10,000 Confederate soldiers, and thousands of them died from the epidemic. As a result, the Camp Chase Confederate Cemetery was formed, an unusual site so far north into Union territory. Miles away in New Madrid, Missouri, a Confederate sympathizer sent his young daughter north to

avoid the destruction of the war. Louisiana Briggs settled in Ohio and eventually married a Union veteran, but she apparently never lost touch with her southern roots. It was said that later in life, she would often visit the Camp Chase Cemetery, where she would place flowers on various graves there. She wore a white veil each time she went in an effort to hide her face. Nevertheless, she acquired a reputation in town as the Grey Lady and was known for her passion for the old burial ground.

She passed away in 1950, but flowers would still appear regularly on the graves there. Visitors to Camp Chase have heard the sounds of a woman quietly weeping while others have seen the figure of a woman in a veil. Something drew Louisiana Briggs to that location. That much is clear. According to the stories, though, it seems she's never left. Thus the country in Connecticut, yet another graveyard place hosts to a mysterious story. Mary Hart was born in New Haven in 1824 and lived a very modest life there.

She was a corset maker and machine stitcher by trade, working hard to support her family. On October 15th of 1872, Mary fell into a death-like state from unknown causes. She was only 47, young even for the late 19th century, and this tragedy rocked her family to the core. By midnight, Mary had expired and her grieving family set about to arrange for a quick and immediate burial. There was a lot of pain, and I can imagine they just wanted to move on. It's said that Mary's spirit still wanders Evergreen Cemetery, close to the site of her

home on Winthrop Avenue, and over the years more than one story has been told about drivers pulling over to pick up a hitchhiking woman, only to have her disappear. Others say that Mary was a witch, although you didn't have to look far in the late 1800s to find a woman who had been accused of something like that. According to the stories, local college students have frequently visited Mary's grave, which is said to be cursed. Anyone who visits her grave at midnight, according to the legend, will meet a horrible fate. As a result, most people refer to her today as Midnight Mary.

There are no records of New Haven college students who have died after visiting Mary's grave site. Whether or not the stories are rooted in fact, it hasn't stopped them from spreading. Mary still has one foot in our world, it seems. It's just not clear who's keeping her here. South Cemetery in Portsmouth, New Hampshire is really a collection of many smaller graveyards. It's the site of the oldest burial ground in town, dating back to the 1600s, and it's a wonderful mixture of styles and centuries.

Together the old Auburn Cemetery, the proprietors' burial ground, Sagamore Cemetery, and Harmony Grove all combine to showcase everything from Egyptian-styled sarcophaguses to winged skulls and Victorian funerary imagery. It's a peaceful place, and much of the grounds have been planted with flowering trees, creating a park-like atmosphere. But that wasn't always the case. In the 1700s, South Cemetery served double duty as both a graveyard and the site of several public executions.

All of them were hangings, and more than a few of them were women, and the reasons were often tragic. The early 18th century was a very different era from our own, and the law books were filled with rules that might seem barbaric or cruel by today's standards. Provincial laws of the time required capital punishment for a wide assortment of crimes, close to 600 of them, in fact, including murder, rape, abortion, bestiality, burglary, treason, and counterfeiting. Another capital crime, though, was known as concealment.

If a woman found herself pregnant outside of marriage in the mid-1700s, her life was effectively over. Social stigma, loss of employment, fines, and even physical punishment were all expected to follow upon discovery of adultery, and the possible resulting birth. And so, to avoid this fate, it had become common for women in that situation to hide their pregnancy, and then abandon the baby to die of neglect and exposure. And that was the practice and crime known as concealment. And it was the very situation that a woman from Southampton, New Hampshire found herself

in during the spring of 1768. Ruth Bley was 25, and split her time between teaching in the nearby towns and working as a seamstress. She was single and poor, but did her best to hide the pregnancy for as long as she could. No one knows where she gave birth to the child. We don't know if she labored alone, with no hand to hold or companion to help her through it. All history remembers is the baby.

But even then, there are still questions. According to Ruth, the baby had been born stillborn. In their eyes, that didn't erase her crime of adultery or the stigma that was sure to follow, but it did mean that she hadn't killed the child. She'd been afraid, and so she had buried the baby beneath the floorboards of a local barn, most likely the site of one of her traveling classrooms. And that, she thought, was the end of it. But what Ruth didn't know was that some of her local students had watched her.

They didn't see the birth itself. They didn't feel her pain, and loss, and fear, and hopelessness. All they saw was a young woman placing a body in the space beneath a loose board. They saw a crime, and so they reported it. Ruth was soon arrested by Isaac Brown, the local constable, and was quickly brought to trial. A jury of 16 was formed, all men, of course, and they soon ruled that the child had died by violence after birth.

Ruth, they said, was a liar, and a murderer. Ruth was held at the constable's home until she could be transported to the jail in Portsmouth, but she was still recovering from the birth, and so she remained there for over a month while her body healed. By July 19, she had been formally accused, and two weeks later she was brought before the provincial court. She pleaded innocent, of course, but no one listened. Her final trial date was set for nearly two months later, toward the end of September.

I can't imagine how lonely she must have felt. How hopeless. Ruth didn't have a chance. I think it's safe to assume we knew that. Society wasn't kind to women in her position, and when you add in the dead infant, well, Ruth was pretty sure how it was going to end. Her trial began on the afternoon of September 21st of 1768, and a little over 12 hours later, the jury handed down their verdict.

Guilty. She was, according to their instructions, to hang by her neck until dead, but not just yet. No, the royal governor of New Hampshire, a man named John Wentworth, issued three consecutive reprieves postponing her execution. He said it was to give her more time to prepare herself for death, but I can't help but wonder if it was really just one more punishment. Rather than walking to the gallows before the end of September, Ruth would have to wait

three long months. Just before noon on December 30th, over 1,000 people gathered at Gallows Hill in South Cemetery. It had snowed earlier that day, and now a cold, freezing rain was covering everything in a layer of ice. Sheriff Packard, the man presiding over the execution, had Ruth placed atop the back of a wagon, a rope draped over her head. Parents stood with their arms around their children, children who craned their necks to catch a glimpse of the woman who was about to die.

There are rumors that a pardon was on its way from the governor, that Sheriff Packard was in a hurry to eat his lunch, and so he rushed the execution rather than waiting for the governor's letter to arrive. At noon, the horses pulling the wagon were driven away from the tree, and Ruth Blay fell off the back, where her body swung slowly at the end of the noose. She died moments later. Those same rumors say the governor's stay of execution did arrive, just moments after Ruth's body stopped moving, but there's no record of a pardon.

Instead of freedom, Ruth was given an unmarked grave, about 300 feet north of the small pond in the middle of the cemetery. Today, visitors to the pond report anomalies in their photos, ghostly images, orbs, and indefinable shapes. Some say their cameras stopped working altogether. According to local legend, a pair of glowing lights has been seen there on more than one occasion, and some think it's Ruth, along with her infant child. Between life and death, between the places most familiar to us, and that vast expanse

of the unknown, sits the graveyard. It has represented the beginning of a journey for countless cultures across the history of mankind, from the Egyptians to the Khans, from across ancient Europe to modern America. The cemetery is a constant thread, tying us all together. Philosophy aside, these are places born out of loss and filled with deep emotion, and so it's no wonder that so many stories exist of the ones who refuse to stay buried. Maybe ghosts are real after all, or maybe we just wish they were. Perhaps it's both.

One final note. Midnight Mary, the New Haven corset maker who fell into a coma at the age of 47, was buried on October 16th of 1872. That night, after the funeral was over and her extended family had traveled back to their homes, Mary's aunt had a horrible nightmare. In her dreams, she saw Mary still alive in her coffin, scratching at the lining in an effort to get out. She was screaming and moaning with desperation, and the image of that stayed with Mary's

aunt long after she awoke, so much so that she managed to convince both her family and the authorities to exhume Mary's grave. After the coffin was removed from the earth, the men opened it up. What they found inside would haunt them for the rest of their lives. Mary's corpse had moved. Her hands were covered in blood, and many of her fingernails were broken. The reason was clear after examining the coffin's lid. The cloth lining had been shredded.

Apparently Mary had finally awoken from her coma, and in a panic, she had tried to claw her way out. Some of the most powerful local legends one can find are rooted in the nearby cemetery. Maybe that's because these places are home to real, actual people who have passed away, making any story about them feel more real. Or perhaps it's that simple chilling fact that beneath these stone markers lay human remains. But sometimes it's not so simple.

And to explain what I mean, I've put together another story that I know you'll love. Stick around through this brief sponsor break, and I'll tell you all about it. When they found her body, it was clear what had happened. Josie had been just 17 years old. She was in her final year of school hoping to be done in the spring of 1876. But all of that hope ground to a halt in October the year before. They say she had simply been cutting through the woods on her way to school. Maybe it was a shorter route, and she was in a hurry, or perhaps she just loved walking

beneath the wide branches of the tall ancient New Hampshire elm trees. She took her reasons to the grave, although with all of that hope and promise as well. When they found her body along the edge of the woods that evening it was a gruesome sight. She had clearly been killed in a different location and then dragged to the trees to hide the evidence. There was a trail of blood smeared grass that pointed them to the exact spot. Following it wasn't hard, and at the same time, I imagine it was horribly difficult. Her cause of death was also pretty easy to figure out.

Josie had lost her head, which explained all the blood that covered that trail she left behind. The people who found her split up and wandered the woods looking for the rest of her. It took a long while, but they eventually found it. According to the stories, Josie's killer was actually easier to find than she was. He was a nomadic laborer named Joseph LePage and had only been in town for a few days. On the outside, he seemed like a hard-working, honest family guy, but there had been rumors of a darker past.

Some had whispered about a murder back in Vermont, while others painted him as a criminal in hiding. Whether or not those rumors were true, Josie's death gave them life. LePage was arrested, and he eventually confessed to the crime. It took two years for the court system to finish its work, but in 1878 LePage was hanged in front of the New Hampshire State House. Josie found rest much sooner. She was buried in her family's plot over in the Buck Street Cemetery, just a couple

of blocks from where she'd been murdered. But the town didn't stop there. They had a memorial constructed on the exact spot where LePage had murdered her. It's one of those tall, four-sided stone towers that tapers to a decorative point about six feet off the ground. And it has a plaque on it. It tells visitors that she was murdered on that very spot, but her body and head were deposited in different locations, locations that the townsfolk marked with two smaller

stones, which means if you visit the monument, you can follow the instructions on it to see just where Josie was found, both places. In a twist of ironic justice, no one seems to know where the grave of her killer, Joseph LePage, seems to be. Researchers have looked for it, but they always come up empty-handed. And there you have it. Josie Langmaid will forever be memorialized by four separate stone markers, while the man who killed her has been lost to time.

And perhaps that's the way. It should be. This episode of Lore was researched, written, and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with music by Chad Lawson. Lore is much more than just a podcast. There's a book series available in bookstores and online, and two seasons of the television show on Amazon Prime Video. Check them both out if you want more Lore in your life.

I also make and executive produce a whole bunch of other podcasts, all of which I think you'd enjoy. My production company, Grim and Mild, specializes in shows that sit at the intersection of the dark and the historical. You can learn more about all of our shows and everything else going on over in one central place, grimandmild.com. And you can also follow this show on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Just search for Lore Podcast, all one word, and then click that follow button.

And when you do, say hi. I like it when people say hi. And as always, thanks for listening.