Stuff You Should Know - Joseph Merrick, aka "The Elephant Man"

Episode Date: December 15, 2020

Joseph Merrick was known as The Elephant Man because of his suffering from what we now know was Proteus Synrome. Learn all about this brave man in today's episode.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant over there, and Jerry's out there floating in the ether,

like the omniscient green goddess salad dressing that she is. Wow. This is Stuff You Should Know. Why don't you work on that? Buddy, that is off the cuff. Don't you know me by now? Off the dome, as they say.

I don't say that. I say off the cuff. I'm not cool enough to say off the dome. But you're shirtless, so there is no cuff. That is true. Man, I hadn't thought about all this. Maybe I should change to off the dome. Speaking of domes, Chuck.

Yeah? What were you gonna say? I was gonna talk about Thunderdome. Were you really? I'm always this close to talking about Thunderdome. Yeah, I guess that's a pretty 2020 way to be, isn't it? Sure. So who's who, Chuck?

Am I master or blaster? And are you master or blaster? Or are we both blaster and both master? I'm not sure who was who, but I would prefer to ride around in your shoulders. That's fine. I prefer to be a giant shirtless man wearing nothing but a leather daddy cross belt across my chest,

which I guess I could probably do that anyway. Yeah, why not? I'm Tina Turner. Oh, so you're Tina Turner riding on blasters' shoulders. Yes. What happened to master? We don't like to talk about it. Two men entered, that's all I'll say.

Okay. He was suffocated by Tina Turner sitting on him. That's right. So obviously, Chuck, we're talking about one of the most, in my opinion, admirable, brave human beings to ever walk the face of the earth. Yeah. And a man named Joseph Merrick,

who a lot of people know of as John Merrick incorrectly, but probably know him even better as the elephant man. That's right. And we have to use those words because that's how he was referred to. We'll get into the reasons why, but we're gonna call him Joseph Merrick, mainly because that's the man's name,

and we don't like to call somebody by their sideshow name. It's a rule here. Sure, no, but it should be noted that he was, and it's really, I think a lot of people probably don't realize this, but he was an active, willing, and initiating participant, founding member, you could say, of his own sideshow act. So he was fully on board with the idea

of being called the elephant man, which is just another facet of this extremely complex person, who I think it's painted with a very simple brush sometimes. But the great thing is, is a lot of times when you look into a widely misunderstood, wildly oversimplified person, you very frequently find that there's a lot

of really terrible stuff to them. They were fine with hitting women. They thought that that was a totally fine thing to do. Like Sean Connery? Right, and instead, when you look into Joseph Merrick, you find, oh my gosh, he was an even better person than I dared hope. He was a really great guy who went through just hell

on earth in the 27 years that he was alive. Yeah, so you may have heard of the story of the elephant man from a few things in pop culture, namely the David Lynch movie, or perhaps the various Broadway shows. I watched a few of those, like clips from a few of those. He's been played by David Bowie, Billy Crudup, recently by Bradley Cooper.

Yeah. And I was kind of... Bradley Cooper said that the movie caused him to want to become an actor. So it's actually pretty apropos that he played him eventually. Well, we can all thank Joseph Merrick for Bradley Cooper's success, that's right.

But yeah, I was kind of curious, because I was like, did they undergo prosthetics? Like, how did they pull this off? But I'm sure you looked at some of the clips. No one does that when you play Joseph Merrick. You just embody the man. You sort of contort your body in certain ways, and you just sort of play the person.

And I think that's a good way to go about it rather than just throwing some big mask over David Bowie or something like that. Right, yeah. Yeah, they just kind of contorted their body. They altered their speech and just affected. Yeah, I think it was a good way to go too. And apparently, I don't remember the guy's name,

but the first guy to play Joseph Merrick in the stage version that came out in, I think 79 or 80, he was the one who started that trend and really kind of came up with this embodiment that everybody else has kind of followed suit with afterward. And I don't know, I didn't catch it. Did you say Mark Hamill was one of the people who played him? Yeah, Luke Skywalker, he used the force.

He did. So there's something really weird that happened in the late 70s, and I'm not quite sure what it was. But in 1979, the stage play based on Joseph Merrick came out. In 1980, David Lynch released just the legendary film, one of the best films ever made about Joseph Merrick. And then there was a definitive book

that was written as well by a pair of authors, one of whom I believe was like a doctor who had like all this great research, but his writing was a little over the top. So they assigned a ghostwriter with him and they basically wrote the definitive book on Joseph Merrick's life and medical condition. And all three of these projects happened independently.

Like one wasn't adapted from the other or anything like that. And they all came at it around the same time, which is really strange in and of itself, but it's even stranger to think that all of this happened centered on a character who had been largely forgotten by this time, you know? Like there was really only two surviving pieces of literature about him, about Joseph Merrick, the man,

that anyone was aware of and they had been written in the 19th century, but then suddenly for some reason in the late 70s, three different projects started up about Joseph Merrick and kind of made him a icon for humanity that is still, you know, lasting today. Yeah, I think the 70s spawned disco fever and elephant man fever.

That's right. And they were both rather unlikely considering both disco and Joseph Merrick were born in the 1800s, specifically in England on August 5th, 1862. So I meant to look it up. I don't know if it's, is it Listershire, like the sauce, Leister, Lister, Lester?

Right. Yeah, you had that last time. It's just Lester from what I understand. Okay, so he was born in Lester, England on August 5th, 1862. And we'll talk a little bit about what they are pretty sure his condition was, but being 1862 at the time after he started developing

some very strange symptoms at the age of five, doctors back then were pretty flummoxed. Yeah, yes, yeah. So the reason why is we'll see is because they think he's one of maybe a hundred people in the entire history of the world or at least as far as people have been writing stuff like this down to have this condition that he had.

So it's not like he started developing strangely and they were like, oh, well, you know, this is what's going on, this is what's to be expected. Instead, just little by little, his body started taking on these odd differing forms. And like you said, I think it was around the age of five that he really started to show that he was going to be rather different.

Yeah, it was five. His father Joseph and his mother Mary Jane noticed he had swollen lips and then a lump started to form on his forehead. His skin started to kind of get loose and rough. And this was just sort of the beginning. His face became spongy, his jaw started to deform, his speech was impaired.

The right side of his body was, or at least upper body was a little more, or I guess a lot more affected because it seemed like his left arm and hand stayed kind of as is, but the right side arm became sort of like this giant fin. Right, so the thing that I guess kind of gave him the moniker, the elephant man,

was growth that started protruding from what I saw beneath his upper lip. So the way that I read that, Chuck, is that like when you pull your top lip up, the part of your gums right there above your teeth, that he had like a growth that started there, and it got pretty big. I think it got up to about eight inches long

and that I guess you would just look at it and be like, wow, that looks a lot like an elephant's trunk, this strange growth that's growing out from under this poor man's top lip. And he later had it removed, so it doesn't show up in any photographs of him, but that supposedly is one of the places where the idea that he was an elephant man came from.

Yeah, so as far as his family goes, he had a couple of younger siblings. It seems like both of them passed away. William Arthur succumbed to smallpox and Marion Eliza, it just says on her death certificate that she was crippled from birth with an unknown ailment. And he went to school, like I said, it didn't start happening until he was five,

and it wasn't so severe right away that he couldn't go to school like any other kid would his age. Things really took a turn, though, when his mom died, when he was 11 years old, things went really bad for him. Yeah, so there's like a few things that you should know about his mom. So his mom was vilified by his biographer

who also would turn out to be his surgeon, who we'll talk about later, Frederick Treves, as a terrible woman who abandoned him. And that doesn't seem to be the case at all. And in fact, Joseph recalled his mom as a very saintly, sweet woman who was basically his only friend. Because when you're starting around five

and you are having trouble keeping up with other kids, something else happened when he was five too, Chuck. He injured, he fell really hard and injured his hip, and that injury became infected. So he became what at the time, they would have called lame or crippled in his, I believe, his left leg. So he had trouble walking from the age of five

in addition to his genetic condition that was making him look more and more different. So he became further and further alienated from his friends. I saw a quote that said that he was becoming a lonely, introspective child, increasingly dependent on his mother for company. And luckily, his mother seems to have been a very sweet woman who, again, in the vernacular was crippled.

That's how she was described. So we have no idea in what way, but today you would describe her as without the use of, say, one or more of her limbs. So they had like that kind of connection, but she also was very protective of Joseph too. So when she died, it was more than him just losing his mother at age 11.

It was him losing his best friend, his main companion. And the source of basically anything good in his life was taken from him at a very young age. Yeah, his father remarried and by all accounts, his father and stepmother were not very kind to him at all. They were emotionally abusive, could be physically abusive. He left school at age 13, which is about when kids left school back then

and got a job at a cigar factory and worked there for a couple of years until his left arm got to the point in hand such that he couldn't do the job anymore. So at that point, he got what they call the hawkers license in order to help his dad, who had a couple of small businesses, but he helped his dad sell stuff from his haberdashery in England there.

And then eventually went to work at the Lester Union Workhouse. He ran away from home a couple of times. It was just a really bad scene. And eventually landed with his uncle, who was a barber named Charles. And he was a good guy and he felt bad for what Joseph was going through

and sort of his home life. So he took him in and that ended up being after a couple of really bad years with his dad and stepmother, a really nice place to be for a little while. Yeah, stepmother was just pretty evil. She was the one that made him drop out of school at 13 and go get a job.

And when he was hawking stuff from his father's shop, if he didn't come home with enough money, she wouldn't give him a full meal. I guess she'd give him enough food to sustain him. But if he couldn't pay for the meal that she had on offer with the proceeds from what he sold that day, she wouldn't give him that meal. And then his father would frequently beat him too.

So it's no wonder that he tried to run away, but then his father would go get him and bring him back home. So he had a terrible life. And yeah, luckily he had that uncle named Charles who took him in for a little while. But even he was like, I can't support you anymore kid

because after a little while, very sadly, Joseph actually had his hawker's license revoked because he was deemed a menace to the community because he was scaring people when he was going door to door trying to sell stuff. His appearance scared people and there were enough complaints that the city revoked his license.

So at the end, by the time he was 17, he had no choice but to go to the union workhouse, which is a poor house. It's what Dickens described in Oliver Twist and some of his other stories where you went there if you were either unable or unwilling to support yourself through honest work and they would put you to work.

And it was basically like a prison for poor people. They'd feed you and they give you a bed, but it was a very cruel place to live. And that's where he spent a little while, I think five years because he had no other choice. And then finally Chuck at one point toward the end of his stay at the union workhouse, he said, you know what?

There's an alternative for me and I'm going to take it. And we should probably take a break now and maybe come back and talk a little bit about this mystery illness that he had that we now sort of understand. Yep. We'll see you in the next one. Bye.

Bye. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. So he referred to himself as the elephant boy and then the elephant man. This was a moniker that was, he sort of embraced, but he thought his whole life that he was this way because of something called maternal impression, which

was still a common belief back then, which was that something could happen to a mother while pregnant that would affect the baby. And that's not to say, you know, she drank or smoked and had a literal effect on the development of the baby. What they meant was she was knocked over by an elephant when she was pregnant, and that is what caused his illness. And he believed that his whole life

and the whole notion of maternal impression, obviously something in the late 1800s, mid-1800s, was it's kind of crazy to think about now, but they actually thought that in utero, it could have an effect like that. Yeah, yeah. So I mean, but it also kind of makes sense, don't you think that if he started to basically grow

what you'd be like, that looks like an elephant's trunk. Your mom was knocked over and almost stomped by an elephant once when she was pregnant with you. We have no idea what genetics are yet. I mean, you could see somebody, you know, making sense of it that way. Maybe, I guess it's hard to kind of put my head in that mindset back then, but what we now think

and what doctors now think is that he had either a case of neurofibromatosis and or something called Proteus Syndrome, and it really seems like Proteus Syndrome as rare as it is, is probably what he suffered from. Yeah, I saw that experts in neurofibromatosis have categorically ruled that out as what he had, because with neurofibromatosis, you have all sorts

of tumors that actually grow on your nerve tissue. So your nerve endings, your spine, your brain, and he may have had those, so it's possible. He did have a case of that, but like you said, it's much like there is Proteus Syndrome, which is characterized by basically an overgrowth of tissue, of bone, of organs even. And I looked into this, so it has a genetic basis,

as I kind of mentioned a couple of times, Chuck, but it's based on this idea of mosaicism, which is where you end up, after you're conceived, and your cells start dividing. At some point, there's a mutation that occurs, and your cells start dividing differently in that they have two different sets of chromosomes. So you have two different sets of cells

with different sets of chromosomes, and they start doing their own thing in building a human body, but it becomes incoherent. Whereas if they were uniform, and all the cells share the same set of DNA, or the same gene set, they would build a coherent human, but in this case, it's incoherent, and it's kind of like if you gave two different building

plans to two different construction companies, and told them to build on the same site at the same time, and just ignore each other, that's what you would produce, but in this case, it's not a building, it's a human body. Yeah, I've heard of mosaic downs, it's the only time I've heard that used, and I think it's sort of similar in that case,

but as far as proteas syndrome goes, it's progressive, your body could be covered with tumors, either benign or malignant. It can malform blood vessels, you can have skin lesions, you can have blood clotting, which results in all kinds of problems like deep vein thrombosis, or maybe pulmonary embolism. It can affect basically any kind of tissue,

from fat to skin, to your central nervous system. It really depends on the patient, who's afflicted, how it can affect you, and it usually, I mean, his was onset pretty late if it started, I guess, outwardly at least at five years old, because it typically starts anywhere from six months to 18 months of age. Right, but that's another thing about neurofibromotosis,

is that it usually starts at, like it's onset is at birth or before birth, so that's another reason, another strike against it. Yeah, so it's pretty clear, they think that he had proteas syndrome, and it's actually a pretty recent thing, like I think it was first described in 1979, and they said, there's probably about 200 people

who've ever appeared in the medical literature that had it. And then some other reviewers in 2011, did another survey of the medical literature and pared it down to basically 100 people in the history of medicine, whoever had proteas syndrome. And the thing is, is Joseph Merrick may have had the most pronounced, advanced case of proteas syndrome ever

of anybody. He had basically every symptom you can possibly have, but the big problems that he suffered from, where like you said, his right hand was, he couldn't use it, because it had kind of fused into a fin-like appendage. He had joints that he couldn't move because the bones had overgrown.

He couldn't hear out of his right ear because his skull had overgrown. And actually, if you see pictures of his skull today, it's just huge and massive. And apparently it weighed something like 20 pounds and got to something like three feet in circumference, which is about a foot in circumference, more than the average human man's head.

So it was just enormous. And all it was, was he had cells that were, that didn't know when to stop growing, whether it was bone or tissue or skin or whatever. And he also had problems inside of his mouth with bony growths too, which affected his speech. Yeah, he couldn't sleep laying down. He had to sleep.

I think one of his associates later in life, he liked to draw a curtain around himself when he slept, but one of his associates kind of peeked in one night and saw that he slept sitting up with his knees drawn into his chest with his head resting forward on his knees. So you can imagine like sleeping like that every night of your life, because his head was so strong and so big

that he would risk waking up with a broken neck and it affected his breathing. I just, I wonder if the late 70s when they first described Proteus Syndrome, if that coincided with the interest in Merrick's story, maybe we solved it. That's weird. Yeah, that would be weird,

but I haven't seen anybody mention that. It's almost like he just appeared in the zeitgeist somehow around then. I don't get it, but yeah, maybe that was it, but no, it couldn't be Chuck, because it wasn't until 1986 that some geneticists said that he probably had Proteus Syndrome for the first time.

So it would have been after that. Yeah, it's just strange. So one thing I wanna say though about Proteus Syndrome and Mosaicism, Mosaicism, that mutation happens after conception. So the weird cosmic irony of this whole thing is it's entirely possible that that mutation did happen around the time that his mother

was pushed down in front of that elephant. It would have had nothing to do with the elephant. Like she wouldn't have been frightened into this mutation or anything, but how ironic would it be if it happened at virtually the same time, you know? Yeah. So in the late 1800s, 1884 is when Merrick decided,

it was a pretty brave choice basically to take his life in his own hands and say, listen, I'm not gonna, I can't go door to door. I can't stay in this work poor house any longer. I want to be able to sustain myself and not just end up in some dark room of a hospital living off the government. Like I wanna live my life as best as I can.

So he checked himself out of that workhouse and he decided to reach out to a man named Sam Tor who ran the Lester Music Hall called the Gady Place of Varieties. And he started exhibiting himself as the elephant man, half man, half elephant. And he achieved a lot of success early on there. And then he eventually moved to London,

made even more money and was actually, I mean, we don't have real numbers on his income, but it was reportedly fairly substantial, like enough to live and live well. Yeah, although living well, I mean, that's a relative term because when he made the move to London, he was on display in a storefront in a building that's still there today.

It's now numbered 259 Whitechapel Road in Shadwell in London. And you can go visit the store today. They sell saris there from what I understand. But he lived in an iron bed in the back of the store and then would come out for these performances, this exhibit. But the thing is, is like he was part of a sideshow, but he was a partner in the sideshow act. He partnered with a man named Tom, the Silver King Morgan,

who was already a showman and I guess bought out Sam Tor's shares in Merrick's exhibition and took over for him. And when he was displaying him, like I said, they were partners. Like there was a pamphlet that you would get that I think there's still copies of it in existence today with kind of a crude drawing of Joseph Merrick on the front.

And like you said, it said the elephant man, half man, half elephant. And part of the biography in the pamphlet was written by Joseph Merrick. It had the whole story about his mother being pushed down in front of an elephant and everything. So like a lot of people just, you know, talk about how he was exploited or whatever.

He was doing this for work. And I guess part of the rationale that he used was people stared at him anyway. Like by this time when he went out in public, he would wear like a cloak. He had a cap with a hood that hung down from it. And he put this on so that, you know, he just looked like this mysterious shape

moving through the town. But at the very least he wasn't just like as gawked at as he would be without, you know, wearing a hat and a hood and all that. But his rationale was that people are gonna stare anyway. I might as well charge him for it. And that's exactly what he did at that storefront in London. And it just so happened, Chuck,

that that storefront was located directly across the street and still is from the London hospital. And some doctors there caught wind of this curiosity who was on exhibit just right across the street. And some of them showed up to check it out. Yeah, at one point he met up with a surgeon who had heard about his story named Frederick Treves. And he invited him to come in for an examination.

And this is, you know, at this point, Merrick had, I guess it was sort of his peak of his deformities and his troubles at this point. His head was about 36 inches in circumference. That right wrist was about 12 inches around. And he had those tumors all over his body, like we said, a lot of trouble walking and talking. But when he was examined by the doctor,

he was like, you know, other than this, you're in pretty good health. He ended up having a heart problem later on. But he said, other than that, you're in decent health. And he said, I would like to present you, if I could, to the Pathological Society of London and to come in for more exams. And it's at this point where Merrick,

I think sort of caught the notion in his head that, listen, I am getting the same feeling of being on display in the storefront. And I don't like how it feels. I think one of his quotes was, the experience made him feel like an animal in a cattle market. And he said, I'm not gonna go from showing myself

in the storefront to being paraded around in front of a bunch of doctors. It's just some sort of weird medical experiment. Yeah, so Treves very clearly identified Joseph Merrick as a really great case study that Treves could make his name on. And ultimately he did. But when he asked Joseph to come back

for more tests and more displays and demonstrations and Joseph declined, apparently Treves was very upset by this. And then a lot of people say not coincidentally, but it's never been proven that he had any hand in it whatsoever. Shortly after he was rebuffed or he rebuffed Treves' invitation again,

the Elephant Man exhibit was shut down by police London outlawed that particular exhibit. On the one hand, it makes sense because Victorian society had kind of started to come to see side shows or freak shows as they were called at the time as really exploitive and distasteful. Even ones where the person on display

was a willing participant, then other people think, well, it was revenge by Treves. He was kind of that kind of person potentially to do something petty like that. But however it happened, his show got shut down and he found himself pretty well off, like you said. Like he had a lot of money. He just wasn't living very well.

He was living in an iron bed in a cold storefront. And he said, you know, I've always wanted to go see Europe, the continent. And I'm going to go try my hand in Belgium and see what they think of my exhibit. And so we moved to Belgium for a while and started up an exhibit there. Yeah, so in Belgium is where he had some sort of ups and downs.

He was ended up being robbed by a manager there who took him on. And he took basically all the money that he had saved. And it was a good amount of money. Yeah. You know, and that's, I think that's kind of how we know that he had some decent success and made a decent living back in the UK.

And in 1886, he goes back to England. And once he's there, he goes back to the London hospital. They say that this is an incurable thing that you have. And there was a letter published in The Times from the chairman of the hospital, Francis Carr-Gaum, that said, that talked about his case basically, he said, hey, if there's anyone out there that thinks they could help this man,

please get in touch with us. There was a big outpouring of support, mainly financial, which really helped Merrick out, because like I said, he had his life savings taken and was definitely a hard luck case at this point financially. And he was able to use that money basically to live on for the rest of his life.

Yeah, yeah, I mean, like there's a story that Treves said in his memoirs, like I said before, there's only two surviving pieces of contemporary writing about Joseph Merrick. One is the memoirs of Frederick Treves, his doctor, the man who ended up becoming his doctor. And then the other was the pamphlet written in part by Joseph Merrick about his life

that was handed out at the sideshow. But in Treves memoirs, he recounts a story that Joseph was so bad off when he finally found passage back after being abandoned, beaten, robbed in Belgium. When he found passage back to the UK, he couldn't even speak either because he was just so shattered by the experience or because the bony protrusions in his mouth

had progressed so much. But regardless, the police supposedly found a business card of Frederick Treves on him. And they took Joseph to Frederick Treves. So he was kind of, at least according to Treves memoirs, delivered by Providence back into Treves hands. And then, yeah, at the hospital, they were kind of like,

you look, you know, this is a really sad story, but he's an incurable. There's nothing that we can do about it. He's got to go. And if it hadn't have been for Francis Cargon, basically turning out and saying like, hey, we don't know what a go fund me is yet, but this is basically what we're going to do.

And the response that he got was just so massive that, yeah, they basically said, okay, there's enough money here now that you can live here for the rest of your life if you want to. And one of the big things that really kicked it off, Chuck, was a visit from Alexandra, or Alexandra, yeah, Alexandra, Princess of Wales.

And the Princess of Wales title is what Princess Die, or Kate Middleton has now. Like it's a big deal title in the royal family. So this was basically like Princess Die or Princess Kate showing up to visit him and shake his hand. And so it became very fashionable among London's high society

to visit Joseph Merrick and patronize him basically and make sure that he was supported. And it really gave the last four years of his life like this amazing boost. Like he went from real hardship and exploitation to about as cushy a life as somebody with his medical condition can have and being celebrated as a really interesting good person

by London, you know, the last few years of his life, which is a real silver lining to this story, you know? Yeah, we should take our last break here and talk about those last few years a little bit more right after this. ["The Princess of Wales"] On the podcast, pay dude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor,

stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair.

Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's vapor because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in

as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough

or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you.

Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so, my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael.

And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen

so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular, and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life.

In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're gonna get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it.

So I rounded up some friends and we dove in, and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good.

There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are gonna change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. So April 11, 1890 is when Joseph Merrick finally passed on. He was 27 years old.

They found him lying flat on his back in his bed. So this article gets it super wrong from How Stuff Works. They say that they quote a historian from University of Utah called Najia, what is her name? Durbach. And she says that it's highly likely that Merrick committed suicide. And that is almost, almost like a suicide.

And that is almost surely incorrect. The story, the legend goes that he wanted to always sleep like other people flat on his back, but he couldn't because his head was too heavy and it would crush his windpipe. And that when he was discovered dead in his bed, he was flat on his back and it clearly tried to sleep like that

because he wanted to be like normal people. And I think even in the David Lynch movie, that's how he dies, isn't it? I've never seen it. Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, really? Correct. Oh, you're gonna love it, dude. It's one of the better movies ever made.

I think it will be one of your favorites. I'll be very surprised if you don't absolutely love it. Wow, I guess this research has spoiled it for you, huh? I knew the story, but yeah, I never seen it all the way through. Yeah, it's a good movie. But in it, I think that's how they depict his demise as well. But if you go back and you look at the post-mortem report

or the reports from the post-mortem report, he was actually found in the middle of the day. He'd already been awakened. He'd been brought lunch at like 1.30 PM and he was totally fine. But then when another doctor dropped by on his rounds to see how he was doing at 3 PM, he was found dead. And he was laying across his bed.

And they think the way that he was laying indicated he tried to get up and either maybe he pulled a muscle or he had a heart attack or something like that happened and he slipped. And that's a big deal for him because his head weighed 20 pounds and apparently when he went down, his head twisted just right and twisted his vertebrae

and killed him like that. So the initial autopsy said that he died of disconnected or dislocated vertebrae. And apparently somebody studied his bones in the last few years and said, actually that's probably exactly how he died based on what his skeleton looks like still today. Wow.

So after he died, they basically took his flesh from his body. They boiled down his bones because they wanted to have those for display and for study. And they are still on display. And they ended up burying his, very unceremoniously, buried what was left of him, his organs and his remaining flesh and an unmarked grave.

And there's a lot of speculation whether, what kind of relationship he had with Treves and whether or not he really cared for him like he claimed to or whether he was just sort of a doctor exploiting this really sort of exceptional case. The reason he's known as John Merrick is because, because Treves called him that in a book, even though that wasn't his name.

So there's been a lot of speculation about the true nature there. Yeah, there's another author quoted in this House of Works article named Joanne Vigor Mungovan. She's written at least one book on Joseph Merrick and she actually found his grave, his lost unmarked grave and confirmed that he had been buried in consecrated ground in a common grave,

which apparently was common in those days. Like people had been buried in that grave before him and people were buried in that grave after him. But it was in consecrated ground in an actual cemetery. He wasn't like tossed in a ditch, like right outside the medical school or anything like that. And so she made sure that he got a marker put up on that grave in the last,

I think the last couple of years that she found it and maybe 2019, I think even as recent as that. Wow, that's pretty amazing. And then one other thing, Chuck, did you remember when Michael Jackson famously made a bid for the Elephant Man's Bones? I do, except that that did not happen. That was all just a big cooked up rumor

from a man named Frank Dillio, who said that Michael bid $500,000 and then a million dollars on the bones of the Elephant Man who was someone he apparently felt very akin to. And apparently that is not true. And it was just sort of like the hyperbaric chamber that that never happened. And Jackson ended up making light of it a little bit

and leave me alone short film by dancing with an animated version of his skeleton. Yeah, and that's really weird. But the thing is, if you go back and search that, there are like associated press articles from like 1987 about it. And they include quotes from people who work at the London Hospital Medical College

who said that they had turned down his offers. So it's really weird because I mean, I always had heard it was made up as well. Yeah, I mean, I think it's one of those things where they, I mean, his mom said it could have even come from him as far not actually bidding on them, but just to make up the story to get in the newspapers. Yeah.

So, I mean, one of the things I just wanna make sure to drive home is that Joseph Merrick didn't give up. I think that's why I was so bugged by the idea that this historian just so cavalier is like it was highly likely he committed suicide, even though all the evidence points to the idea that he didn't. But Joseph Merrick lived 27 years putting up with

some of the most humiliating, disparaging, terrible treatment that any humans ever had to endure. And he did it with like grace and dignity. He like read and he wrote poetry and he like corresponded with people. And he had like a gentle, soft heart. And finally, thanks to things like the stage play in David Lynch's movie,

he's been portrayed accurately in that sense. And I think that that's great because I think that that's, that will be his legacy forever. Somebody who was a very admirable human being who put up with a lot more than, you know, I probably could have with dignity and grace. It's quite a story. Well, since Chuck said it's quite a story,

that means that that's it for the Elephant Man and that it's time for a listener mail. I'm gonna call this the ghost story. Recently for the Halloween, we re-released our ghost episode and where I detailed the old lady I saw in Athens in the middle of the road. And this comes from Eric King.

He said, I thought I'd share this with you guys. In the episode of Unsolved Mysteries that reminds me of this, there was a motorcyclist named Robert Davidson who was struck by lightning after pulling to the side of the road during a storm. When paramedics arrived, the situation looked grim. As a crowd began to gather around the incident,

a mysterious woman in a black dress holding a Bible appeared, just like my lady. She bypassed paramedics and began to pray over Davidson after a few tense moments of her chanting and beating her Bible in the ground. He began to show signs of life again. The woman in the black dress smiled and then disappeared amongst the crowd.

Davidson wound up in a coma for two months but came out of it with no permanent injuries. Upon further investigation, it was found that the road where he was struck was near a site that was once a religious community in the mid-1800s. The black dress witnesses claimed the woman was wearing a similar outfit

to the one on display in a museum containing artifacts from the site. So Eric says, I think, he thinks I should investigate mine a little bit more. Maybe there was a similar religious site near there where I saw the woman in black. And that is from Eric King and he and his wife were big, big listeners.

Well, thanks a lot, Eric. That was a great one. Appreciate it, big time. Chuck, you're gonna do some research? I was actually doing some anyway the other day, so I'm gonna keep it up. Oh, cool, man. Have you found anything so far?

Nothing. Okay, well, yeah, you gotta report back if you find even the slightest shred of evidence of anything, okay? Of course. Well, while we wait for Chuck's report on the source and origin of his ghost, we'll leave you to it and you can write into us to say hi

and how's it going with your research, Chuck. Write it in an email and send it off to StuffPodcast at iHeartRadio.com. I'll see you next time. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen

to your favorite shows. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back

into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast

and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.