Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Dare Stones

Episode Date: September 25, 2019

What happened to the Lost Colonists who disappeared from Roanoke Island in the 1580s remains a mystery to this day. But it’s possible a carved stone a man vacationing in North Carolina found in the 1930s may have solved it – if the stone isn’t a hoax. 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.

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 iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey there, and welcome to short stuff. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles DeVito, Brian,

and there's Jerry Jerome, rolling over there. Yeah. The only reason you stop that note is because you saw me draw it to a close like a conductor. I know. You conduct me. That's a t-shirt. So this is a follow-up, everyone.

We do these occasionally. About five-ish years ago. Five and a half-ish. Five and a half-ish. Five and three-quarters. We did a full-length episode on the Roanoke Colony, the creepy, spooky, croateau and mystery of Roanoke. So good.

And in it, we spent just a few minutes talking about the darestones, but when I went back and listened to it again, we didn't go into nearly enough detail. And so we're going to do that right now. We are. So just to kind of bring you guys back up to date real quick.

Roanoke was an island. It is, and it still is, as a matter of fact, off of North Carolina near the North Carolina Virginia border. It was the first attempt, I believe, at an English colony. There was a first wave in 1585 that didn't work out. And then a second wave,

maybe it was even the third wave, technically, came along in July of 1587. And this ship carried 90 men, 17 women and 11 children. And it was led by a guy named John White, who was named the governor of the, I guess, Roanoke Colony. And he had his daughter, Eleanor Dare, with him. She was married to Ananias Dare.

I think that's how you say that, don't you? And that's a great 16th century name. It sure is. And Ananias, I just want to say that all the time. And Eleanor had a baby, the first English-born or English baby born in America, whose name was Virginia Dare. Now, do you know if they did it in America?

Was this conceived in America? Or just born in America? I don't know. I don't know, actually. I was just kind of curious. It doesn't really matter, because what really matters is this was the first English baby born in the New World.

And it was a very big deal for little baby Virginia to come along. It was. So in short order, Virginia's grandfather, John White, the head of the colony says, hey guys, I'm kind of bored. I'm going to go back to England and I'll get some supplies. I'll be back within a year.

You guys sit tight. Just keep building this colony up and it'll be all good, BRB. Right, but he did not BRB. He beat a long time from coming back. And about three years worth comes back and no one's there. His daughter's gone, his grand little Virginia's gone. Everybody's gone.

The buildings are dismantled. And as you learned in that episode, the word Croatoan was carved. And that was, I guess it was a tree, right? Yeah, they carved it into a tree. And Croatoan was the name of a friendly nearby tribe that the English had been in contact with. That's right.

So what was not there was a cross and White said, hey, listen, if there's some bad stuff going on and you guys have to split, like just to take some time to carve a cross into a tree. So I'll know that bad stuff happened. That cross was not there. So there's always been a big mystery about what Croatoan was all about,

why there was no cross and what happened to the 118 settlers. Like that was it. There was the sum total of the evidence and John White asked around a little bit. Didn't try all that hard to find them actually for it being the, you know, his daughter, his son-in-law and his granddaughter.

And the first American. Right, exactly. First English American. Sure. You want to get us killed? Yeah. And so he goes back to England and the mystery just sets in.

When Jamestown settlers come along, they ask around, they hear rumors of tribes that are made up of like light-skinned people who speak English and live in two-story thatched roof houses. But none of it is ever confirmed. There's no evidence whatsoever what happened to these lost colonists at Roanoke. And that's the way it was for 350-ish years

until the summer of 1937, when a guy from California named L.E. Hammond, which as I've found is not to be confused with L.E. Hammond Inferno, which is a synth band that I came across today accidentally. Are you into them now? I kind of, they're pretty good. His name was actually Lewis Hammond.

But he was a produce dealer from California and he showed up at Emory University and said, hey, I'm on vacation in North Carolina with my wife looking for hickory nuts as you do. Sure. And I found this weird stone. What do you guys make of this thing? Yeah, so Emory's right here in Atlanta

and it was inscribed with a message and he said, can you guys tell me what this says? And I'm gonna read it right now in full. Good. This is the sort of modernized version. Yeah. Because it's sort of like reading Jeffrey Chaucer or something.

So it has to get translated. So here's what it said, Father, soon after you go for England, we came here, only misery and war for two years above half dead, these two years more from sickness being 24. A savage with a message of a ship came to us. Within a small space of time, they became frightened of revenge and ran all away.

We believe it was not you. Soon after the savages said spirits were angry. Suddenly they murdered all, save seven. That means all but seven. My child and Ananias too were slain with much misery. Is there any other way to be slain is my question. Buried all near four miles east of this river upon a small hill.

Names were written all there on a rock. Put this there also. If a savage shows this to you, we promised you would give them great plenty presents. Right. So there you have it. Yeah. And it was signed EWD, Eleanor White Dare.

That's what you would think. Yeah. And so the Emory professors were like, where did you get this? You may have just solved like a 350 year old mystery. And Lewis Hammond was like, I don't know, somewhere about 50 miles inland. They went, what did you just say?

He said, I don't know about 50 miles from Roanoke Island. And they said, well, you know, John White, the governor famously reckoned that the Roanoke colonists had moved 50 miles into the main. So that would definitely coincide with that idea. So they went back to this area where Lewis Hammond found this rock and they could not find the spot.

He couldn't find the spot where he originally found it to show them, but he left it with them. I think sold it to him, I think is more accurate. And then went back to California and was scarcely heard from again. That's right. So we're going to take a break. We're going to come back and tell you,

as Paul Harvey would say, the rest of the story. S-Y-Y-S-K-S-K. On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s, called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cold classic show, HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude 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 beeper, 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, OK, 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.

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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. So here's the deal with that original stone. Depends on who you talk to. Some people say it was authentic. Some people still say it's authentic,

and may have solved the mystery. Some people say, no, it was not. We'll talk a little bit more about that in a second. But what happened was the whole country started talking. There was a professor at Emory named Haywood J. Pierce Jr., who published that paper, published a paper talking all about this stone in the Journal of Southern History in 1938.

He had his father, Haywood J. Pierce, senior. Dad. And he owned, daddy owned a college, Brunel University, which is in Gainesville, Georgia. It was Brunel University now, I think. Brunel now. Just the fever. That's probably on a shirt somewhere.

So they started to have suspicions, because like you said, when they went back, they couldn't really find exactly where he found it. They got, I guess, a private investigator or somebody in California to look into this Hammond guy. And they really couldn't find much to corroborate a story or even who he said he was other than his name and address. I saw an internet sleuth explained it by saying,

you know what, this guy was married before in a 1920 census, he has two children. And by 1937, they were still underage. So he may have been laying low and keeping away from publicity, so he wouldn't pay child support. Oh, interesting. I thought that was a clever, interesting explanation for it. Because what I found was there was nothing to indicate

that this guy was actually a fraud, just that they couldn't really follow up with them very easily. Yeah, but at the very least, Pierce and Pierce were still very intrigued by this original stone and said, here's a reward offered for any additional stones that pop up, 500 bucks. And all of a sudden, people are like, oh, I got some stones.

You want some, you want five, you want to give me $500? I'll show you some darestones. Specifically, a man named Bill Eberhardt, who was an artist. He was a stone cutter from Fulton County right here in Atlanta. And he was paid $2,000 for 42 forgeries that he turned over as darestones. And it's not like they said, hey, thanks for these forgeries.

Here's some money. They thought they were real at the time. But on the stones, the series of stones, it basically tracks Eleanor. It's like Eleanor's little breadcrumb diary that goes all the way down to Georgia, almost to Atlanta. And along the way, she marries a chief from the Cherokee tribe, has another daughter named Agnes,

you know, possibly like becomes romantically entangled with Tom Hanks over email for a little while and then ends up dying in a cave in Georgia. I just love the idea of this stone cutter, like inventing the storyline, you know? Right. He's like, this is the life I wish I had had. You know, you could have been a screenwriter,

Bill Eberhardt. Yeah. I wonder who, if he's got to have family here still. This was just like the late 30s in Fulton County. Oh man, I hope somebody's listening. They're like, stop talking about my uncle Bill like this. I think it's great. He's a good man.

Your uncle Bill's awesome. I guess. All right, so this is flash forward to 1941 in April. The Saturday evening post said, you know what, these Norman Rockwell covers are great. But what we really want to do is run an expose on these darestones and basically shut it down as a complete forgery.

Yeah, they did some real legwork to just totally undermine the darestones, which really kind of goes to point out how much the darestones had totally captured the imagination of the entire country. This was a big, big, widely publicized deal. And the Saturday evening post came along and said, no, look at this crack and this crack and this crack.

And basically by the end of the article had just completely revealed the whole thing as a hoax. And definitely everything after that first one that Lewis Hammond found is most decidedly a hoax. At best the Lewis Hammond stone is like you were saying, up for debate. But the Saturday evening post said, no, there's an necronistic language in there.

Things like reconnoiter would not have been used. There's a problem with the fact that they use Arabic numerals, which didn't come into use until later on. It's weird that she made like these instead of use, which is kind of like Roman lettering a little bit. And at the time when the Saturday evening post dropped this article, it was like, oh, well, that's it.

It's a total fraud and a total hoax. But as the years kind of went by and Bernal University suffered a tremendous public relations crisis as a result of this, a lot of people looked really bad for verifying these stones as authentic. And then just being totally undermined by the Saturday evening post,

Bernal and everyone related to the stones almost literally buried them away in a basement and then later on in an attic in Bernal and tried to forget about it as much as possible. Yeah, Pierce and Pierce had an egg on their face and it was no good. But people today say, again, that it's possible that first one might be like for real.

It's different rock than these other ones. It's this really bright white quartzite interior and has a dark exterior. So it would have been something really good, like almost like a chalkboard for her to use. So that sort of makes sense. And it doesn't have this anachronistic language that those other stones do.

The sign off is a little weird with EWD because that's probably not what she would have done in the 16th century. Other people say, no, no, no, it's still, that Chow and Riverstone is a phony. And what they're hoping is that modern techniques can kind of test this thing out at some point and see if it's in fact legit.

Yeah, because it's basically been cleared by a lot of the humanities people. Like there's an expert in medieval graffiti who said, this actually checks out pretty well. Here's an example of somebody using Arabic numerals. Here's an example of somebody signing their name in this kind of abbreviation. So a lot of it's been explained away.

And the fact that it is white quartzite that when she carved it, like you said, it would have been like a chalkboard. That would be a terrible stone for a forger to choose because you would have to go to tremendous amounts of trouble to fake it, basically. You'd just choose a different stone. So the fact that it would have been really hard to forge

and they tried at the time of the Saturday evening post article to forge it three different ways and nobody could do it, really lends a lot of credence to, it keeps hope alive that this first stone, the original stone is actually real. That's right. So maybe we'll find out one day as our technology advances what happened to the original colonists at Roanoke

or that this stone says exactly how it happened. That's great, I hope so. All right, Chuck, you got anything else? I got nothing else. Well, that is it for short stuff, everybody. Oh, wait, Jerry, you got anything else? Mere, mere, mere. Okay, well, that's it for short stuff, everybody.

You can read a really great article on the darestones on how stuff works and you can listen to our original Roanoke episode too at StuffYouShouldKnow.com and in the meantime, we'll see you next time. Short stuff out. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,

visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.