Lore - Trick or Treat 2017 - Set 1

Episode Date: October 9, 2017

The first Trick or Treat Halloween special of 2017 features two tales. The first, A Bridge Too Far, walks us through a winter train ride that went horribly wrong over a century ago. The second story reminds us that life is a lot more complex than we’re willing to admit. Rise Above introduces us to the darkness found inside that complexity. Access premium content!  

What in the world is a lore trick-or-treat episode? Well, I'm glad you asked. You see, every October, I try to help lore listeners experience Halloween all month long. And so, only in October, I release extra episodes in between the full, regularly scheduled ones. That means that every Monday this month is going to have something fun for you to hear. Today, you'll hear two different tales. In between them is a brief sponsor break. And there you go.

Now, pull up a seat, turn off the lights, and make sure the door is locked. I want to tell you something creepy. I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore. At 2 a.m. on February 5th of 1887, the Montreal Express was working its way up the Cold Iron Nervous System of the North American Railroad Network. It had pulled out of Boston hours before and was weaving its way beside the Connecticut River along the New Hampshire and Vermont borders. That's a lot of geography, I know.

Just know this. The Montreal Express was a daily passenger train that ran back and forth between Boston and, you guessed it, Montreal. This time, though, the train was running behind schedule, nearly an hour behind, and it hadn't even left Vermont yet. They had a long, cold journey ahead of them. But as planned, the train pulled into the White River Junction Railway Station and stopped for passengers to enter and exit the cars.

When it pulled away minutes later, it was nearly 20 degrees Fahrenheit below zero. Each of the passenger cars had a small wood-burning stove, but they struggled to fight off the creeping chill in the air. Everyone on board, 79 passengers and six crew, bundled up against the cold, and did their best to keep their minds off it. As the train pulled away from the station, a conductor by the name of Smith Sturtivant walked up and down the aisles collecting tickets. Minutes later, as the tracks crossed the White River on the longest wooden railroad bridge

in America at the time, the train gave a shutter. One of the crew, sensing something was wrong, reached for the bell cable and gave it a yank, signaling to the engineer to stop the train. But you don't stop a train that quickly. Because of a lot of weight and a lot of momentum, and while the speed dropped rapidly, the train kept moving across the bridge. As it did, one of the sleeper cars snagged on a piece of railway track that had broken due to the cold, and when it did, the car veered away from the rest of the train and

plummeted 60 feet into the river below. That car was joined by the three other cars behind it, and as it fell, they followed it down. Not to the rushing waters of the White River, though. No, with temperatures as low as they were, the river itself was frozen solid. It was as if the train had dropped onto pavement. The wood stoves and oil lamps exploded inside the train cars, and within moments everything was a raging firestorm.

And those flames licked up the support legs of the bridge, and within minutes it too dropped into the gorge, landing right on top of the train. Five of the six crewmen died that night. Of the 79 passengers, 30 of them perished. Most were burned to death in the fire. Some were crushed by the train, or the bridge. A few even drowned as the heat of the flames melted the ice. According to one local paper, only eight of the bodies they recovered were identifiable.

Rescuers who were rescued were transported across the river to a farmhouse where the injured and dying filled up the house so quickly that the rest were moved to the barn. Rescuers found Sturtevant, the conductor, and were able to pull him to safety, but he died the next day. A woman named Maria Sadler, who had been returning home to Quebec, was found alive and pulled free, although her ankle broke in the process. She thankfully survived. When they found Edward Dillon, he was alive and uninjured, but pinned beneath a pile of

debris. Heavy objects lay across his chest, a wheel from the train car, heavy timber, seats, and try as they might. The rescuers weren't able to lift the weight of it all in order to free him. Dillon, to his credit, stayed calm. He chatted with the crew. Then he turned his head, and his eyes went wide. The fire that was consuming the train was slowly creeping toward his location.

He panicked. He begged. He pleaded, and the rescuers doubled their efforts, trying to dig him free. But it was no use. The debris was simply too heavy to move. When the first of the flames reached him, he cried out one final time, and then he closed his eyes. The 20 or so men who had been trying to free him could do nothing more than step back and

watch in horror as Dillon burned to death, right before their eyes. He wasn't the only one to burn to death, either. David Magré from Quebec was also pinned beneath debris near the fire. When it approached, he pulled out his pocket watch and wallet and handed them to his young son, Joseph, and then set his farewells before the wall of fire surrounded him as well. Today, locals still whisper about the ghostly figure of a man in a conductor's uniform who's been seen walking along the tracks. He's only ever seen at night, and only near the river.

Maybe Smith Sturtevant has returned to help with the rescue efforts, and he's just never left. The farmhouse across the river has survived as well, but not without some baggage. It's said that so much blood soaked into the floorboards of the second floor that the stains can still be found on the ceiling of the kitchen. Another rumor says that animals refused to go inside the old barn. The farm, by the way, was known by the family name, Paine. And although the old wooden bridge has been replaced by a more modern one, the original

abutments are still there, but the locals will tell you that more than just stone has survived. According to some, the area surrounding the bridge still has a smell. Many who have traveled across the bridge have caught the scent and have described it as a mixture of burnt wood and something else, something less common than the cool New England air, something less pleasant than the autumn leaves. It's the smell, they say, of charred human remains. It's amazing how easily people are drawn to simple answers.

Complexity just isn't fun. Maybe complexity offers us less hope, or perhaps it just reminds us of how small and powerless we are on this giant rock. Simplicity is the opposite of all of that. So if a tsunami crashed against the coast of an island a thousand years ago, it was easy to believe that the gods were angry and punishing them. The truth is a lot more complex, tectonic plates, earthquakes, seismic waves, and all of that, and therefore a lot less easy to grasp.

Simplicity is sexy. So it should come as no surprise that much of folklore is an engine that runs on the power of simplicity, and no topic represents that more fully than witchcraft. Because for centuries, if anything odd or unexplainable happened in your community, the conclusion was easy to reach. Someone in town was a witch. That's the world that Grace was born into. She was part of the early settlers of Virginia, the daughter of a Scottish carpenter and his

English wife. Unlike her parents, though, she was born in the New World. In 1680, Grace married a local farmer, James Sherwood. Her father gave them some land as a wedding gift, and they settled into life there on their small farm. A year later, he passed away and left the rest of his property to them. Nothing extravagant, but 200 acres was still something. The stories say that Grace was unusually beautiful, tall, and full of laughter, the sort of woman

who stood out in her Puritan English colony. She turned heads, which probably didn't go a long way toward helping her neighbor ladies like her. Still, life needed living. She and her husband James raised three sons there on the farm, but it was hard work. Everything was hard work in the late 1600s, though. It was hard work to stay healthy, to work the land, to fill the bellies of three hungry, growing boys, and to please everyone else around her.

Life was just hard. Grace spread herself thin, too. She had all the normal roles that came with being a wife and a mother, but she also helped out in the community as a midwife. Part of her garden was even devoted to a large number of medicinal herbs, and she used them often to help others with pain and illness. But some people didn't care for that. It smacked of dark magic, of someone who was playing with the natural order of things,

and it was not a major leap of logic to assume that she was fluent in spells, too. So, when one of her neighbors, a man named Richard Capps, claimed that Grace had killed his bull with one of those spells, they went to court. Thankfully, the evidence was non-existent, so the case was dismissed. Grace and James sued Capps for defamation, but lost. A year later, in 1698, it was John Gisborne's turn, only this time it was his pigs and his cotton crop that she had bewitched. That case was also dismissed, and Grace lost another lawsuit for this lander.

After that year, it all repeated once again when Elizabeth Barnes accused Grace of transforming into a black cat that entered her home through the keyhole. Grace somehow lost that slander case as well. Each time it happened, though, she and her husband were forced to pay the court fees, which only seemed to drive them further into poverty. And then, in 1701, James died, leaving her vulnerable to future attacks. Four years later, it happened again. That was the year her neighbor, Elizabeth Hill, physically attacked her.

And maybe it's because of the bruises and scratches on her body, but this time she was able to win her assault case against Hill. She walked away with the equivalent of about $200 in today's currency. But she also ticked off a few people in the process. A few months later, Elizabeth Hill returned, blaming her recent miscarriage on Grace, and the women went to court. By March of 1706, two separate juries were called to serve in the trial. One was sent to Grace's home to search for evidence of her witchcraft, while the other

was tasked with examining Grace's body for witch's marks. On March 7th, Grace was stripped naked by 12 local women, who examined her from head to toe, looking for dark spots or raised parts of her skin. You know, things that we might call moles, or skin tags, or freckles. And surprise, surprise, they found some. Oh, and the woman in charge of this gang of angry mole hunters? One other than Elizabeth Barnes, the woman who failed to get Grace arrested eight years earlier.

Someone was holding a grudge, I think. I won't bore you with the court details. There were more trials, there was a bit of controversy, and a clear lack of solid evidence. And yet, the judge felt that something had to be done, and so on July 10th, Grace Sherwood was taken to a plantation at the mouth of the Linhaven River. A crowd gathered to watch that day, as Grace was stripped naked and examined again by the group of women. This time, though, they weren't looking for witch's marks.

They were looking for tools that Grace might have hidden on her body, because they were about to do something insane. They pushed her into a boat with the sheriff, and he rode it about 200 yards out into the water. Then, after her hands and feet were bound to each other, and a 13-pound Bible was tethered to her neck, she was brought to the side of the boat. Their logic was about as solid as a cloud, and should sound insanely familiar to fans of Monty Python.

If she floated, she was a witch. Drowning was the only acceptable proof of her innocence. Grace Sherwood plunged into the dark waters of the Linhaven River around 10 a.m. on the morning of July 10th, 1706. Unlike so many women before her, this was the end. The delicate balance of life and death hinged on the crazy notion that witches were so immune to Christian baptism that they actually floated. And so, with a firm shove, into the river she went.

But Grace was stronger than the fear that filled her community there in Virginia. As her body sunk into the depths of the river, as the shock of the cold water on her naked skin and the burn of her lungs overwhelmed her, she fought back. She managed to untie herself and shrugged off the weight of that enormous Bible. Then she swam free. It was a sign of her guilt though, so she was thrown in jail the very same day. She beat part of the system, only to fall prey to the rest of it. It's twisted and wrong, I know.

But to the people of her community, it was simple logic, and simple as we've seen, is a lot easier to believe. Grace appears again roughly eight years later. That's when most historians think she was released from jail. She reclaimed her property, paid her back taxes, and then settled into life alone. Her boys had grown up and moved on, and it seems that the accusations were gone as well. The rest of her life was relatively quiet, and I have to imagine she was glad for that. She passed away in 1740 at the ripe old age of 80.

I like Grace. She managed to do something that few others in her era had. She faced a test designed to punish the innocent, and she got away. Yes, our world is still full of dangerously irrational people, people that allow hate and jealousy and their own deeply held insecurities to drive them toward monstrous actions. But maybe that's not the inescapable prison it appears to be. Maybe, like Grace Sherwood, we can rise above it all and swim to safety. Nothing can only hope.

This episode of Lore was researched, written, and produced by me, Aaron Mankey. Lore is much more than a podcast. There's a book series in bookstores around the country and online, and the second season of the Amazon Prime television show was recently released. Check them both out if you want more Lore in your life. I also make two other podcasts, Aaron Mankey's Cabinet of Curiosities, and Unobscured, and I think you'd enjoy both. Each one explores other areas of our dark history, ranging from bite-sized episodes to season-long

dives into a single topic. You can learn about both of those shows and everything else going on all over in one central place, theworldoflore.com slash now. And you can also follow the show on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Just search for Lore podcast, all one word, and then click that follow button. When you do, say hi. I like it when people say hi. And as always, thanks for listening.