The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Haunted Vaginas, Fairy Floss, Books Made of Human Skin

Episode Date: October 27, 2021

SEASON 5 IS HERE! The weirdest things we learned this week range from REAL ectoplasm to how many licks it (allegedly) takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop.  The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is a podcast by Popular Science. Share your weirdest facts and stories with us in our Facebook group or tweet at us! Click here to learn more about all of our stories!  Click here to follow our sibling podcast, Ask Us Anything!  Follow our team on Twitter! Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Sara Chodosh: www.twitter.com/schodosh Claire Maldarelli: www.twitter.com/camaldarelli Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Produced by Jess Boddy: www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy Theme music by Billy Cadden: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LqT4DCuAXlBzX8XlNy4Wq?si=5VF2r2XiQoGepRsMTBsDAQ Season 5 of The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week was recorded using the Shure MV7 podcast kit. The kit includes a Manfrotto PIXI mini tripod, so everything you need to get recording straight away is included—that’s super-helpful if you’re a creator who’s buying their first mic set up. Check it out at www.shure.com/popsci. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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That's code weirdest for 20% off. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your ocean front room.

Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or The Hilton. Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and heck stories every week.

And while most of the stuff we stumble across makes it into our articles, we also find plenty of weird facts that we just keep around the office. So we figured, why not share those with you? Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week from the editors of Popular Science. I'm Rachel Fultman. I'm Claire Maldorelli. and I'm Sarah Trottosh. Welcome back to Weirdest Things Season 5.

Yay. So excited to be back in your feed. I hope our listeners had a lovely break. We did pop in a non-zero amount. I hope lots of you got to enjoy our live show virtually at Caviote. But yes, weirdest thing is back. We will be in your feed every two weeks for further notice unless otherwise stay. So get hype for that.

So on the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each offering up a little tease about some kind of fact or story we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, convalescing, etc. And decide which one we just absolutely have to hear more about first. Then, once we've all had time to spin our little science yarns, we reconvene and decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was. Sarah, why don't you start with your teas? I'm going to be talking about the era of science where eminent researchers investigated very seriously an ectoplasm. Like the Ghostbusters go, right?

Yep. Cool. Just like that. I just had a perfume called ectoplasm. So, apical. Based on what my fact is truly about, I worry what that smell would be. Uh-oh. also listeners in case you did not guess given the date of this episode's publication and the already spooky vibe of the facts this is a Halloween-pute episode.

We're recording this early in October, but for me it's been Halloween since September 1st. So thrilled, thrilled to keep that going. Claire, what's your tease? Yes. So I have a variety of candy facts. share, but I'm going to share my favorite one as my teas, which is that cotton candy was invented by a dentist. That's a traitor. A traitor to his kind. No, they, that's, I'm saying it's a conspiracy because like they want us to need dentists. Exactly. Exactly, Rachel. Is that why they did it?

Okay. You're ruining your fact, though. We'll get into it. But wow. Okay. So my teas is, is that you might be surprised what kind of people bound books in human skin. Not normal people? Debatable. Oh, boy. Where do we want to begin? I want to know about the cotton candy conspiracy. Yes.

Okay, great. Yeah, let's do it. All right. So this started off as just being like, five weird candy facts. And it turned into this rabbit hole I went on yesterday about cotton candy. So that's going to take up a lot of our time. And then I do have four other candy facts for us.

So don't worry. I'm not lying. There are five candy facts of different varieties. But I send a good amount of time on cotton candy. I'm sorry. I also hate cotton candy. So like I really have yeah. I like cotton candy, but I wouldn't, I mean, I'm into like a cone of cotton candy like fresh out of the little sugar spinner.

So it's like warm. And it's really about the like sensory experience and caveat I have to be able to wash my hands immediately afterward because otherwise it's sticky and gross. But it's like I wouldn't be like, oh yeah. It's time to eat five pounds of cotton candy. And there are many candies I do feel that way about. I just don't understand who can eat the whole thing. They always give you like an enormous cloud of it. And I don't.

I want like two bites. Okay, but see, I feel the exact opposite as Rachel and Sarah. Like, I think there is no sensory experience. Like, it melts a median your mouth and it's gone. I'm like, what the heck just happens? That's the experience, Claire. I don't like. The experience does not exist.

Okay. Whatever. So going back to dentists and cotton candy, I'm pretty sure that if you asked any modern dentists today, they would tell you that cotton candy is not good for your teeth. So it might come as... I don't know what you have you checked that? Tell me more. With dentists?

10 out of 10 dentists. Don't recommend cotton candy. Okay, I made that up. That's not true. Don't fact check me. These are lies. Okay, so Cotton Candy was invented by a dentist and I'm going to now tell you about this weird dentist guy from the 1860s. So William James Morrison, a nice classic name there, was born in 1860 and was apparently this very well-to-do guy. living in Nashville, Tennessee. So according to a July 2005 journal article in the history of dentistry, which note have to subscribe to this journal, he was not just a noted dentist, but he was also a lawyer, author,

and leader in civic and political affairs. And he was also noted to be quote unquote, personally associated with President Woodrow Wilson. So I don't know what personally associated means, like friends, friends on Facebook, whatever the equivalent was back then. Yeah, I feel like it's like the equivalent of being Facebook friends personally associated is like you're not really promising much about how well you know the president. About the quality of that relationship. But Woodrow Wilson kind of sucked a lot.

So like maybe it's for the best for the best in our judgment of this guy's character. Maybe he was trying to distance himself and later he was like, we were really only associated. Agree. Agree. Anyways, so in 1897, he's living in Nashville and he has this friend, fellow Nashville, I don't know. That feels right. That's what Nashville call themselves. John Wharton, and they conceived and patented an electric candy machine to produce what they called fairy floss.

So quite the dentist-inspired name there. So their device worked fairly similarly to the ones that produce modern cotton candy today. So there was like a heater at the top and that, okay, I'm telling you all this because I really didn't know how cotton candy worked until yesterday. So this is very exciting for me. So there's a heater at the top that melts the sugar into this like syrupy substance while simultaneously whipping it at super high speed. until it forms this like fluffy cloud-like substance, a solid, essentially. And then it cools super quickly. So so rapidly, in fact, that the sugar can't reform itself back to its like functional state.

So it's just like in like chaos when you eat it. And so I love, I love that description. The fact that cotton candy is chaotic like fundamentally is kind of beautiful. It just like doesn't know what's going on. So it just like melts in your mouth and like is dead to you and the world. So a 2016 not geo article equates it to essentially eating a sugar form of glass because that's like also a similarly way that you, that glass is formed. So with their device ready, Morrison and Wharton brought the newly minted candy machine

to where everyone who's worth knowing brings their inventions, the Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904, otherwise known as the St. Louis World's Fair. I love World's Fairs. I wish I could have been alive back then. And also in 1876 when they had like the world's first first fair in Philadelphia. So I could have tried a banana for the first time from a fork. Yeah. I just feel like bananas would have tasted better if you had them for the first time at the

World's Fair in Philadelphia. And like and you paid a ton of money for it and ate it like with a fork. So, yes, it was a huge success and they made this giant profit and then all of a sudden, like, this fairy floss becomes like a popular food to eat. So time goes on though, and a lot of people found Morrison's and Wharton's candy making machine to be kind of like unwieldy and it would make these super loud noises and shake and fall apart. So finally. As chaotic as the fairy. floss inside it. Exactly. So finally, food company gold metal products redesigns the machine and devised it such that the cotton candy could roll onto a piece of paper and come out like a cone.

Now, somehow between this like unwieldy chaotic device and this perfectly designed one from gold metal, it changes from fairy, the name of the product, changes from fairy floss. to cotton candy and I truly just could not figure out who did this. There were like some claims that some other dentist renamed it cotton candy, but I was like, that can't be. I couldn't verify it. And I was like, two dentists cannot be involved with cotton candy. But if anyone knows the answer out there, I'm dying to know who came up with the

cotton candy. That's interesting, though, because it's still called fairy floss in some parts of the world. Is it really? Yeah, I think the UK, like fairy floss, candy floss. I think fairy floss is a much better name. It makes me want to eat it more than cotton candy. Like, who wants to eat a big lot of cotton? But fairy floss is magical.

Exactly. It's like the opposite of actually flossing, putting sugar in between your... It's true. You're like eating popcorn is the opposite. That's true. That's true. Just directly depositing things in between your teeth. I didn't say it was bad for you.

I said it was the opposite of flosser. So true. So moral of the story is if you want to succeed, bring it to the world's fair because that is where everything was happening back then. Now, I do want to note, and this is something that the 2016 Not Geo article I mentioned earlier, they cite a book called Sweets, A History of Candy, which I now want to read, by Tim Richardson, and essentially go into this long description of the fact that even fairy floss was not totally invented by these dentists. So this kind of like sugary substance dates all the way back to the 15th century when Italian chefs used to create sculptures from fluffy sugar,

which had been melted down and then drawn with a fork and draped over a wooden broom handle. I've seen this on, well, in several places, but including Great British Bake Off. It's what they do for the decor for the tower of little balls. They're not, you know, the tower of little balls. Like on lemon, like marangs. The little shoe balls. Yeah, they're just like little balls of puff pastry. Like literally like cream puffs, but I think often without cream inside them.

And you make it in a tower. And it's very hard to make because you have. to make them go up in a tower. And then you decorate it with this like spun sugar. Oh my gosh. It's like the lead. I just. And I've seen shows where people try to make this who are not like super professional.

And that is where it all literally falls apart because it's really hard to get that perfect, um, that perfect sugar consistency to, to make this kind of like web. So people end up with like caramel or like. literal shards of like a giant, you know, very difficult to get that sort of like fiberglass texture that makes it so delicious. Yeah. Sugar work in general, I think is like super hard. Yeah. Well, it's as hard as glasswork, really. But you do get to eat it. So that's exciting. So it's much better. It's chaotic. I don't know. I would totally fail at British Bake-a. I would fail at any like baking competition. I can't even make like the little like marangs on lemon meringue pie come up. I mean,

I think that's the hard thing to make. Is it? I don't know. Everyone else makes it look so easy. And I just destroy the pies. How many people do you know who are making? My family loves lemon meringue pie. They're just like obsessed with it.

Yeah. Wow. I mean, I do love it. But like, wow, it's a very unusual pie to make because I think what Rachel said is true, like most people struggle with meringue. Yeah. It's so hard. Your family, I think, is an abnormality, Claire. Maybe.

Yeah. It's like, it's like the like prime Thanksgiving Day pie. It's like lemon meringue pie. I don't know. For our family at least. Wow. You guys have fancy taste. Yes.

Okay. So that is the story of cotton candy. And I was really hoping that it would make me crave cotton candy or like it more or like have respect for it. But none of that happened. Not even respect. Just pure. Well, what about your other candy facts? Do you respect any of those candies?

All right. So. Um, yes. So the second one is, uh, if you're anything like me, if you have Halloween candy at home, like if it's like, I don't know, like Reese's, I would eat like the entire bag. Um, so that's totally fine because as I reported in a previous story on popsye.com, uh, it really doesn't kill you. Uh, in order to die from eating too much chocolate, you would need to eat 7,000 and 84. Hershey Kisses. I love the...

Don't threaten me with a good time. Hershey kisses suck. But any... Oh, actually, why is it? Oh, my gosh. I mean, they don't suck. They're fine. It's just like I wouldn't pick them over other things.

How can you love... I love them in the cookies. How can you love a Hershey Kiss cookies? Are like some of my favorite cookies. I'm sorry. Because I have quite simple taste, Sarah. And I don't need any of that 98% dark chocolate.

K-po. But can we also, can we talk about how the, um, the specially shaped, uh, Reese's just taste infinitely better than regular Reese's any shape? Yes, because they have, I do think they have gluten in them though. They do. I was just not to say I like, I don't understand like what tastes different about them because I literally can't taste them. I think it's just the chocolate to peanut butter ratio.

That's what I was going to say. There's far more peanut butter. And the peanut butter and they put so much sugar. sugar in the peanut butter. Oh, see, I, okay, I like the, the king reases or whatever that are like extra tall or whatever and then I refrigerate them. So the chocolate's like kind of crunchy. Also really good.

That's, you're getting the same thing, I promise. Okay. All right. That makes me feel better. I did last year around Christmas, I bought, I bought them because I thought it was so hilarious that they tried to pull this off. They had like a bag of mystery shaped ones that were clearly just like, rejuvant. or it wasn't clear to me whether the machine had messed up.

And the machine must mess up, you know, what amounts to a huge number given how many they produced. But I also thought maybe someone designed a shape that then once it got off the production line, they were like, oh, no, like that doesn't look like an ornament that looks like a turd. So it was just literally like Christmas mystery shapes and they were all just blobs. But I was like, this is great. I love this.

still? This is like, like, if you go to like the jellybelly factory near Sacramento, they have, that you can buy these like giant things of like the rejects and they call them belly flops. And I love that. There's a theory that like, um, like all the mystery flavor candies are generally like that I guess in between batches of candy, you get like a mix of two flavors and it's not either. And so that's not really a flavor. It's a mystery flavor because it's just like a combination. I think with dumb-dums, that is true. Oh, dumb-dums. And then other brands, some of them are, there is a genuine flavor.

But also maybe it's a genuine flavor that they used to like palate cleanse the machines. Totally. Okay. So fact number three, most of you might know this, but I didn't know this. So I'm going to share it with you. according to the Tootsie Roll website, there have actually been at least three detailed scientific studies that have attempted to determine the number of licks required to reach the Tootsie Roll center of a Tutsi pop. Of course there have.

How many licks is it? Okay. That's a good question. Okay, so they all, most of them came to like different conclusions, which makes me think that their like scientific methods are not that good. But the first one was from a group of engineering students at Purdue University, and they reported that their licking machine, which was modeled, quote unquote, modeled after the human tongue, which makes sense, took an average of 364 licks to get to the center of the chitzy pop. Okay. And then the University of Michigan also did a study, a group of chemical engineering doctorate students, so not undergrads.

Um, they got 411 licks. And then real licks or tongue imitation licks? Real licks? That's a good question. I mean, I feel like maybe the problem is the tongue machine. Oh. No, no, no, no. University of Michigan was also a customized licking machine as well.

Wow. Okay. Yeah, these are all, none of these are. Who makes a custom looking machine? Yeah. Exactly. Um, and then the last one is. Beller Mine University in Louisville.

They completed like an independent study with 130 participants who recorded their licks and that research is still ongoing. So they continue looking to this day. Exactly. I love that. Wow. Tutsi.com really needs to update. and if they have indeed finished their ongoing studies.

Okay. Number four. Snickers was created in 1930 by a man named Frank Mars, of course, and he decided to name the bar after his horse, which, okay, interesting and funny, but then, but like maybe not a great fact. But what adds to it is that the lollipop, whoever invented the lollipop, also named it after his favorite racehorse,

named a lollipop. Wow. Sorry. Wait. Yeah. So these are two different horses for two different candies. One Snickers, the other, the lollipop. Apparently.

Wow. There's a lot of unexpected connections in these candy facts. Right. And that was the last one. Oh my gosh. I only had four. I'm sorry. I have a candy fact.

I can fill in. Oh, please do. Oh, my gosh. Go for it. Did you guys know that chloroform used to be a key ingredient in certain, like, flavorings? I think pineapple, don't quote me on that. I'm going to fact check it, but, like, chloroform apparently has in very small quantities, like, kind of a fruity taste. And so it used to be a key flavoring element in old-time candy.

That's not bad. Halloween. That's terrible. Yeah, much scarier than people who think there are like grazer blades in candy. This is actual chloroform. Yeah, literally. Right. Well, the new thing is to be like there are so many weed candies with THC that are made to look like the real thing.

And I'm like, no one is giving your kid $40 weed sourpatch kids. That's a joke. It's too expensive. Yeah, who would give away their weed candy? Not I. All right. We're going to take a quick break. and then we'll be back with more facts.

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That's s-h-U-R-E dot com slash P-O-P-S-C-I. Okay, we're back. And I'm going to talk about books bound in skin and the surprising owners thereof. Yay. Yeah, it's a little dark, but it is spooky. So here we go. So for most of us, I would say, and this came up again and again in different articles I was reading about this subject. The idea of like everyday objects being made out of human skin is like something we associate with horror movies maybe.

Or with like historical monsters like the Nazis. There was a book in 2010 by Mark Jacobson, a nonfiction book where he cross. chronicled an investigation into a lampshade that someone had bought at a rummage sale in New Orleans that was supposedly, according to the seller, crafted from the skin of Jews murdered at concentration camps during World War II. And this is kind of a recurring myth, a lot of like anecdotal evidence from the aftermath of the Holocaust. The lampshade was in fact made of human skin based on lab analysis, but there was no way of knowing for sure where or when it came from. I share that obviously awful fact, because for most of us, I think that's like the kind of context that we feel

like these objects exist in, you know, almost too horrific to speak of and like made and owned by the worst kinds of humans who have ever lived. But while I'm not about to defend the act of binding a book in human skin. And in fact, I will dunk on it in a little bit. Recent research shows that there was a time when doing this was, like, considered really normal in like pretty mainstream society. I am about to roast Victorian-era physicians yet again. Yes.

I'm just going to say, you mean our regularly scheduled roasting of Victorian-R-A-R-A-A. Yes, exactly. Once a day, at least. I had to start by saying that everything I'm about to share comes courtesy of the anthropodermic book project. Anthropodermic Bibliopeg-G is the binding of books in human skin. And the anthropodermic book project started up a few years ago a group of researchers wanting to investigate supposed instances of this practice.

Because as you might imagine, it's the kind of thing we're like there are a lot of sort of urban legends around it. There are a lot of schools around the world or libraries where it's like, yeah, that's totally bound in human skin. So they wanted to suss out how much this had actually happened and in what circumstances. And so far the team has identified 50 supposed skin books, and they have tested 31 of them using peptide mass fingerprinting, which is a technique that analyzes the amino acids in the collagen of a skin sample. And those proteins can reveal which animal it came from. It's not so exact that you could tell the difference between like a human and another

great ape. So it is possible that all of the human bound books are gorilla bound books. But seems like a lot of work to go through, honestly, if it comes up as great ape and someone said it was a human-bound book, the assumption is it's human. But it is exact enough that you know it's not like another mammal. So 13 of those 31 books have turned out to be made from some non-human animal leather like pig or sheep. But 18 of them have been confirmed as human, which is pretty creepy. And those weren't like a baker's dozen of books found in the homes of serial killers or war criminals with bookbinding hobbies. They were mostly medical texts that were

bound by physicians during the 19th century. A lot of this information comes from excerpts from a book called Dark Archives by Megan Rosenblum, who's a UCLA librarian and a member of the group I just mentioned. I should say I bought this book as soon as it came out. I have yet to read it from cover to cover. I bought it knowing I was not going to have time to read it for months because I was just like I need to support the concept of someone writing a book about books bound in human skin. That sounds like the whole book is about that? Yeah.

Wow. What's the name of it again? It's called Dark Archives. It sounds like it should be in like the restricted section in Harry Potter. Yes, absolutely. That is the vibe for sure. And so this is based on my like perusal of a few parts of the book and some exercise. it's published online, but I definitely recommend that listeners get a copy themselves or go to a

library and read one there. So one of the stories that Rosenblum follows is the binding of three books using the skin of a 28-year-old Irish widow named Mary Lynch. She was admitted to Philadelphia General Hospital's massive and unkempt ward for the poor in 1868 with tuberculosis. And at some point during her stay there or before, she also contracted parasitic worms. And when she died in 1869, a young doctor named John Stockton Hugh did her autopsy. And he published a paper on her case, as he estimated that her body contained like eight million parasites, something absolutely bonkers like that. And he thought it presented the first known case of trachinosis in Philadelphia, which is a parasitic worm.

So for reasons unknown, he decided she was someone worth binding a book in. He removed the skin of her thighs and preserved it by putting it in a bedpan full of urine. Unfortunately, urine is how we often tan leather goods. Still? And he kept it. Well, at the time it was. I don't think there are probably some hipster tanners still using urine. But I think now we can, we know what it is in the urine, presumably, that makes it work.

And we can not use pee. So, you know, reduce reuse, recycle, et cetera. So he then kept the skin for safekeeping while Mary Lynch was buried in an anonymous Popper's grave. Now, you may be wondering how we know who Mary Lynch was. And the identities of most people who ended up as book bindings throughout history have been lost to time. But when Hugh had three books on the subject of women's health and reproduction bound in Mary Lynch's skin, which he didn't do for some decades after the fact, he noted her name, or at least her first name and last initial in his inscriptions.

So Beth Lander, who's a librarian at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, which is where these books ended up. Philadelphians will know the Motor Museum, which is a place you can see all sorts of medical horrors like these books. And she was able to cross-reference that inscription with hospital records to figure out the unwitting donor's identity, which I really love because kind of the main, the ickyest thing about this practice is not that the leather is human skin necessarily because, to be frank, we are all meat. Our skin is potential leather. I mean, I don't think it's what I want to be done with my body after death.

But, like, as a material, it's not inherently gross. But the idea of a rich physician arbitrarily and without the consent of the patient, you know, using her as a material is obviously very upsetting for reasons. I hope I don't have to explain to our listeners. And I'm very, I find, it very satisfying that this researcher was able to unearth her story in some small way so that when people are looking at these objects, that they have the historical context, and that this woman actually, her memory now is living on along with these objects in a way that was not actually true

in many decades of her time as a bookbinding. So one thing that's interesting is that it seems like physicians generally had books that they found, like, particularly worthy of admiration, um, bound in human skin. I mean, at the time, uh, Rosenblum points out in her book, it was also just, like, a status thing for people who were physicians to have large libraries and to like have rare books, especially rare medical books. And so it seems like the binding, uh, with skin, often from their patients was like it imbued more of like a sense of soul into the book or something to that effect or like added gravitous from a medical perspective. But one book in this guy Hughes collection is really curious.

It's basically a giant dictionary of the books found in a particular library at the time it was printed. So it's like a phone book. White pages, yellow pages? Yeah. Yeah, something like that. And he took the trouble to bind it in human skin. And there's this great passage in the book where a librarian she's talking to is like, this book is such a pain in the butt. Like, it's the least interesting book in our collection, but everyone always wants to see it

because it's bound in human skin. But like it's like he just picked a book at random off his shelf and was like, why not? And in looking at it, Rosenblum, noticed that it lacked a lot of the binding skill and artistry of the other books in his collection. So she suspects that he bounded himself, like, as a hobby. Like, I knew that I was going. Right. So he was like, let me give this a try, which, yeah, there is something worse about that somehow. That's way worse than like. Like, it's creepy to feel like I will bind this important book in human skin to make it more important. But it's way worse to be like, I'm just going to practice. you'll see on this unimportant book.

Right. It really boils down how much he just saw like the remains of other living people as like a crafting material that he was like, give it a shot. So unfortunately, there's no like feel good resolution to this. Well, there are some books about criminals bound in their own skin, which like is still gross to me from like a human rights perspective. But at least I like understand what they were going. forward with that? Like I understand the intended mood of that object in terms of like creating a spooky cursed tome. But most human bookmindings seem to just come from impoverished patients whose doctors were like, I can reuse this, which really just speaks a lot to how physicians saw their patients

during this time. And we get into that in a few other episodes, a weirdest thing. I mean, the Brown Dog Riots, which was about whose corpse might be used for vivisection without their consent. It was much more likely to happen if you were poor. And that made me think of this. But there is at least one instance, supposedly, of someone willingly giving their skin for a book. So, Me, Flamarian, who was a French astronomer and popular author in the 19th century, was widely reported to have been sent the skin of a deceased female admirer who wanted his latest work to be bound in it. According to a 1946 paper on the subject, at least, Flamarian claimed that the myths that rose up

around the story, which, you know, there was a widely reported story that the donor was this like beautiful young countess who was in love with him and was like, as my last act, I must know that you will take my skin. And he was like, that's totally made up. The press made that up. But he did maintain that the skin was human and had come from a willing fan, which is fascinating. But, but wait, but, okay, but the upshot is the same. A fan sent her own skin after death. That was like in her will. Allegedly.

Yeah. I feel like that still makes you a big fan. Yes. Yes. I don't really know what's disputed about the story then. And also, what does it say about him that he wasn't like, no thank you? Right. Yeah.

I'd prefer not. But yeah, you know, like I said at the time, in the 19th century, this was just like a thing people did. And they seem to think, you know, it's like a nice, it immortalizes the person. It like lends a level of spiritual devotion to the book. But like that only works if everybody is willingly giving up their skin for the books they're getting put on, which seems to have almost never been the case. I will say, just to wrap up, that one thing that Rosenblum and her colleagues really hammer home is that what their investigations have taught them is that books bound in human skin can look like anything.

They can have like a suede texture, a waxy texture. They can in any color because, again, like, sorry to remind you, but like leather is just skin from other animals. Like you can do any of the same treatments and change the look of it. it in the same way. So her point is that, like, yes, a lot of the purported human skin books are fake, but also you would not be able to tell if an old leather book you were holding was human skin. It's not like in Evil Dead where it's like, or like hocus pocus, where it is like very overtly skin. So that is just to say that, you know, whenever you're holding an old book, especially if

you have an occasion to hold some books from the 19th century, which I'm realizing I have done because I did go to the New York Academy of Medicine Library for my book research. And I did hold some things that were like literally falling apart because they were so old. And I was like, I shouldn't be allowed to touch this. And now I wonder if any of them were found in human skin. But I will just be wondering for the rest of my life, as will many of my life. As will many of our listeners, I hope. And I leave you with that spooky, creepy thought. And I'm so sorry. I hope that they continue to wonder. Yeah, I hope you never get a confirmed human skin book, because I feel like that's much worse. That's worse. Yeah. And, you know,

understandably, there's a lot of a debate about, like, what do you do if you realize that your institution is in possession of such a thing because most of them are travesties. You know, know, they are abominations. Again, not because the material is inherently wrong, but because it was like a horrible breach of consent and like a disrespect of human bodily autonomy for them to be made. You know, Rosenblum suggests that like to just get rid of these objects or hide them would be worse to pretend that this didn't happen and that instead we should learn something from them. So let's try to learn something from them. A lot of Victorian era doctors were real jerks.

That's what I've learned. You already knew that. I did. Okay, we're going to take a quick break, and then we'll be back with more facts. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition. back. Okay, we're back. And Sarah, tell me about ectoplasm. I want to know everything.

Okay, so, uh, so the ectoplasm story begins in the 1920s with a French woman named Eva C. I'm not going to butcher her last name because she was French and I don't speak French. She was the first materialization medium, which means that, that she materialized things, mainly the ectoplasm. And what is ectoplasm? You might ask. I did. Spiritualists might tell you that it is like a manifestation of a spirit in the physical world or like of spiritual energy generally. And then like anyone else would tell you it's just mostly like cheesecloth or gauze perhaps like some kind of nice chiffon maybe with a little shimmer. and it definitely it definitely looks like gauze just to be very clear like I'm going to ruin the mystery

here. Ectoplasm, you're picturing your head like some kind of goopy thing or maybe it's green or it glows or something and like IRL ectoplasm quote unquote ectoplasm it definitely just looks like a sheet of gauze. Cool. Got it. But but but that is important to. No, because despite the fact that it did look like cheesecloth, Eva C.

Convinced a lot of eminent scientists that this was otherworldly, that it was a spiritual, a physical manifestation of a spirit. And there's a quote from Popular Science magazine from September 1921 about how ectoplasm, quote, can assume the shape of a hand or a face or even a whole figure, and how it is curiously like human skin in cellular structure. I'm not sure what ectoplasm they were looking at exactly. Maybe it was cotton candy. Yeah, or maybe they had some faulty microscopes.

I'm not really clear. But, yeah, Eva, Eva was extremely good at convincing people that she produced ectoplasm. And my best guess for how she did it, because it doesn't, it just doesn't look spooky at all, is that she was just, maybe giving sort of a very sexy show to a lot of like sexually frustrated early 20th century men and they were just like maybe too busy looking at her naked body to know this was going on because her whole show was like like seductive but she was like produce i don't know i don't know why producing ectroposum would have been sexy but she was naked during a lot of it was a confusing time for a lot of people yeah uh but she was naked during a lot of her seances

and, you know, she was recently attractive, I guess. And so maybe that was, I don't know. They seemed to have been too distracted to really see what was going on. But she was really just the first ectoplasm producer. Not all of them were that successful. But there were some of notes such as Marjorie Crandon. Marjorie was married to an obstetrical surgeon. and she was so convincing that she was the only medium who was picked to perform her seance in front of a committee of experts from Scientific American, which I guess at that time must have been run by like scientists and not by journalists.

Right. And they had put out a $5,000 prize to anyone who could, I guess, just convince them that ectoplasm was a real thing from the spirit world. and Marjorie could produce ectoplasm out of a number of orifices. Any number. I truly think any number. There's apparently photos of it coming out of her nose, perhaps her ear, like draped on her ear and neck. But in general, it did come from her vagina, which makes sense if you remember the episode where I believe Rachel talked about Mary Toft producing, was it a live show?

Yes. It was rabbits. Yeah, that was a live show. A Halloween live show, in fact. Yes. So seasonally appropriate. But yeah, she appeared to give birth to a series of animal parts, not whole animals, just like bits and bobs, really. Bits and bobs.

Just bits and bits and pieces. And ultimately it turned out that she'd just been shoving stuff up there And then making a big show of being in labor And a bunch of men were like there's no other explanation So yeah So I guess Marjorie's grift was a little more complex In that she wasn't claiming they were coming She wasn't giving birth to ectoplasm

She was simply hiding the ectoplasm in there and then bringing it out during the seance, right? Because it's, you know, I've never been to a seance, but I gather they're dark, they're dimly lit. Sure. The spirits don't like light. Yeah. Literal and figurative. So, yeah, she would hide the ectoplasm in her vagina.

And it's important to note that this ectoplasm was not gauze. It was possibly bits of sheep lungs. What? Like, I did not see that one. This is more similar to Marytoff than I expected. Yeah. So it was just like this spirit world is spitting viscera at you. Yeah, which, I mean, to be fair, is it's more, it's closer to what I would imagine

actopause looking like than gauze. It's sort of slimy, you know? Yeah, no, I think the spirit world throwing viscera at you makes more sense than the spirit world throwing gauze at you. I'm not sure I can explain why. I guess because gauze is a man-made product. Like a woven object doesn't really seem like something a ghost is going to produce.

But like I could believe they'd have some like guts to spew at me. I agree. If such a thing were to occur. Yeah. So, you know, I don't know whether that was like the secret to Marjorie's success. But she did seem to be able to produce like a number of objects from between her legs.

Like vaginal tripe. Yeah. To the point that one expert wondered whether maybe Marjorie's husband, who was, remember, an obstetrical surgeon, had somehow operated on her to enlarge what he called, quote, Marjorie's most convenient storage warehouse. My gosh. A sentence that could only have been written by a man. I just want to also thank Mary Roach for that quote, because I did get most of this information from a chapter on actoplasm in her book, Spook, which if you haven't read it, is really wonderful.

So fantastic. Honestly, I haven't read it in like, I think I read it when it came out and I haven't read it since then. So all of this is washing over me afresh. Yeah. But it makes me really want to reread it. It had been a while, and I went back to my copy and read this. chapter and it yeah i had forgotten about the most convenient storage

warehouse um which is really just phenomenal um anyway so marjorie was not like the the panel was very was very divided um and i don't I think in the end they didn't award her the prize they were not fully convinced um and in fact

one of the members of the committee was like in on it with her um so she mean she continued performing until her death So she wasn't like totally disgrace and she's this is like actually the only thing not from her book from Mary Ridge's book but she did seem to have like all kinds of other trickery going on that she was just like constantly inventing new things to just like really convince people that she had some kind of magical power. So anytime people were like, hmm, I think me thinks something is afoot. She was like, well, what about this though?

Can't explain that. Just move right along. See, that was the problem with Mary Taft is she was a one-trick pony. She just kept producing rabbits. And then they figured out that she was having rabbits delivered to her room. But, you know, all she had to do is be like, it's not rabbits anymore. It's a sheep lung. Right, yeah.

Yeah. So, yeah, Marjorie was an inventive woman. And finally, there was Helen. Duncan, who did use gauze, but I guess to greater effect than Eva C did originally. And I think maybe her success was due to like the incredible volume of it that she could produce. I kind of, now I'm kind of remembering a black and white photo in spook of just like a really horrifying pile of gauze. Yeah.

But maybe I made that up in my head. I mean, there's like, I'm getting a. it mixed up, whether it was in the book or, like, you could also find photos of ectoplasm online and, like, the various women who seemed to produce it. She would produce, like, six-foot-long stretches of ectoplasm. And Harry Price, who was a psychic researcher in London when that was a job that you could have, was he spent, like, two months of his life investigating Helen Duncan and her supposedly ectoplasm producing abilities. And he, I guess, was on to the vagina trick.

So he designed a special garment that was kind of just a jumpsuit. Pants. It was like work around that. It was basically that. It was like a full body situation. So you couldn't like hide something in your vagina. Right. Anyone who's ever worn a jumpsuit and then had to use the bathroom.

No, it was impossible. Yeah. Disaster. So, I mean, I guess that was novel for women. Like, not a lot of jumpsuits for women in the, in the, I've lost track of exactly what year it was at this point, but in the early 1900s. So, but good old Helen, she produced the ectoplasm despite the jumpsuit. And so, uh, so despite the jumpsuit.

So yeah, yeah. Oh, wow. Not of a, not of a, not of, I mean, maybe she did sometimes, but she could do it. despite not having access to her vagina. So Harry Price went sort of another hypothesis, which is that she must have an extra stomach, like a cow, and that she was some kind of like ruminant where she could like store things in this extra stomach

and then produce them later. And he was like kind of right. Like I don't know why he felt that she needed an extra stomach. Right. One stomach can hold a lot. Is enough storage, yeah. Yeah, they're very stretchy. So he did, like, he did, he got her in the end because he did ask Helen to undergo an x-ray.

He thought he was going to maybe see an extra stomach. But you just saw a stomach full of gauze. Well, he didn't in the end because he asked her to do it. Like, I guess after she performed the trick, which is what it says in the book, but I'm not really clear why it would be after. I would assume it would be before. because he was really sold on the two stomach. Yeah, I guess that's my... He was like, it won't matter that she's already emptied out.

I'll be able to see that second stomach. So, and she agreed. And then like, right as they're about to do the x-ray, she literally ran out of the building, followed by her husband. And then they came back 10 minutes later. And she was like, no, it's all good. I'm fine.

Let's definitely do the x-ray now. And Harry Price was like, I think that something is going on. She was like, no, no, no, it's all good. we're going to do the x-ray. And when Price was like, turned to her husband and said, would you, could, like, basically, like, do you consent to a search? Like, if I, if I searched you, would I find symectoplasm on you? And her husband was like, I'm not really comfortable with that.

And they just, I think they just kind of left. I don't even know whether the x-ray was ever done. They just had a stalemate. Yeah. But Price was, he, he, he. He did not give up and he eventually like, I guess gathered enough proof or like maybe just people who thought that Helen was full of shit. And he gathered these people and had like an intervention with her husband and basically

was like, look, the jig is up. We know it's, we know she's faking it. Like maybe we don't know exactly how, but like we know what's going on. It might be an extra stomach, but whatever it is. and they convinced the husband they bribed him they gave him a hundred pounds they were in London at the time

and they convinced him to convince Helen to do the trick on film and the husband promised and then went home and then the next day he and Helen ran away to Scotland never to be heard of from again so like the obvious answer here probably is that like Helen Duncan was a very

talented regurgitator, which is like a thing some people can do. It's a very wild thing. It's definitely not good for your esophagus because you do like, you're vomiting something up. And so some of your stomach acid comes up along with it and that is not a good thing. But it's a pretty good way to make objects appear from your body magically. I don't know that anyone ever like fully got her to admit that or like really confirmed. it. And in the book, Mary Roach says that it's also very possible that most of the time, because her husband had to sit next to her in the seances for some kind of, like, magical reason, that probably he just, like, slipped her a bunch of gauze or something so that she could undergo the, like,

required vaginal exam that often happened before sciences to make sure you weren't smuggling anything. Naturally. But she could probably vomit up a lot of gauze. And it would probably be pretty slimy and more actoplasomy. I don't know. Just I don't, I feel like for some reason this particular industry, like, has anyone ever been more like girl boss gaslight gatekeep? That's what I think of. It's kind of great.

Like, it's just such a, it's for them. It's such a particular era of women being like, do you know what we can convince men that we're doing? So yeah, I kind of love it. I kind of love Helen Duncan and Marjorie and Eva. They were wonderful. Eva also, like, I'm pretty sure was married to a man and also her assistant was married to a man. But I could not totally chalk this down. but I think that she had like a 25-year, like, intimate relationship with her assistant Juliet.

Right. She had a best friend and roommate. Yeah. And they were just, you know, they were just partners in crime and definitely not partners than anything else. But that's the story that I want to hear is like Eva and her ectoplasm and her girlfriend. That's like lovely. I'd love to watch that film.

Wow. Well, that's great. that story. Much better than the human skin book. Not better, but happier for sure. Quite. So what was the weirdest thing we learned this week? I mean, like, honestly, just the fact that a dentist invented cotton candy is very weird. I love the story of the ectoplasm girl bosses. So I'm torn between those two. Oh, I'm going with ectoplasm. Oh, well then. Actoplasm wins it with the tiebreaker.

Actopause and always wins. Absolutely true. The weirdest thing I learned this week is a popular science podcast. We're available on all major podcast platforms. So subscribe wherever you're listening now. And if you like what you hear, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. It helps other weirdos find the show. For more information on the stories you heard in this episode, come find us at popsye.com

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