February 4, 2015 • 28 mins
A handful of our most-requested podcast topics that don't have enough solid research for a whole show: Stagecoach Mary, Edward Mordrake, Robert the Haunted Doll, the London Beer Flood, the Lost Army of Cambyses and La Maupin all get time in the spotlight. Read the show notes here.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy D. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. Over the
last couple of years the Holly and I have been
on this show, we have gotten literally hundreds and hundreds
(00:21):
of requests from listeners, and maybe five percent of them
are requests that we get over and over and over
and over again, And unfortunately a handful of those most
requested episodes are also ones that we can't really do
a whole show on. Sometimes there's just not enough information
available about the thing. Sometimes the information exists somewhere, but
(00:47):
there's not a way that we can really get to it.
It's either uh, not in a language that we speak,
or it's so spread out among so many different things
that it would take way more time than we can
really put into a show that puts out two new
episodes in a week. Or sometimes they're just there's information,
but it's so far removed from primary sources that it
(01:11):
just doesn't feel that reliable. Occasionally we actually get emails
from people who kind of go, I want you to
do an episode on this. I know the information is
out there, because my friend is doing his master's thesis
on it, and I'm just gonna go ahead and put
it out there. We cannot do a master's thesis level
of work for a podcast that comes out twice a week.
We would be on like a Dan Carlin hardcore history
(01:33):
kind of schedule if if that were the time that
we could put into every episode. So what we're gonna
do today is to take six of these things that
are impossible to do an episode on their own, and
we're gonna just run through them in one show. So
that is our six impossible episodes for today. So first up,
we're gonna talk about Mary Fields, who is also known
(01:55):
as Stagecoach Mary. And this is a person who a
lot of people here about for the first time through
a post on Badass of the Week, which, if you're
not familiar with that site, the language is a bit blue,
so maybe do not google it after this episode and
read it allowed to an elementary school class or other
small children, etcetera. Here's what we do know about Stagecoach Mary.
(02:17):
She was born a slave in Tennessee in eighteen thirty
two and was owned by a family called the Dunns.
She had one of the Dunn's daughters Dolly basically grew
up together, and Mary learned to read and write while
she was still a slave. After slavery was abolished, she
moved to Toledo, Ohio with Dolly Dunn, who was going
there to become a nun. Dolly Dunn became known as
(02:41):
Mother Amadeus, and she eventually moved to Cascade, Montana to
teach at a school for Native American children. For a while,
Mary stayed behind in Ohio, but when Mother Amadeus became
extremely ill, they sent for her. Mother Amadeus eventually got better,
and Mary stayed in Cascade. Did odd jobs around St.
(03:01):
Peter's Mission, and she basically acted as a protector for
the nuns. She also got a job delivering the mail
by stagecoach, which made her the first African American woman
to work delivering US mail. And we talk in our
Charlie Parkhurst episode about what a demanding and dangerous job
stagecoach driving was, and Mary apparently took to it tremendously.
(03:24):
She was extremely reliable as a driver, and she developed
a reputation for fighting, brawling, and taking guph from absolutely
no one. Uh There are a number of stories of
her knocking men out with one blow under a variety
of circumstances, and this is also why she wound up
not working for the convent anymore. Uh. It was the
combination of her personality and her work that earned her
(03:46):
that nickname Stagecoach Mary. Eventually she retired from stagecoach driving
and opened a laundry and she became a really beloved
figure in Cascade, which actually made her birthday a holiday.
And stage Coach Mary died in nineteen fourteen. She was
eighty two at the time, and she is buried just
outside Cascade, Montana. In terms of information about her, there's
(04:09):
a children's book about her, as well as a documentary
called Discovering Mary, and that's by a woman named Joyce Fitzpatrick.
I haven't seen the film itself, but she talks about
picking up tidbits of information for years before making the film,
and the film itself actually started out more as a
documentary of her recording her own process of looking for
(04:30):
more information about Mary Fields. So when for People first
started asking us to do an episode about stage Coach Mary,
there was actually a crowdfunding project in the works somewhere
about a documentary. I'm not sure if it was this
documentary or a different one. But now almost two years
later when I went looking for it again, all traces
(04:52):
of that have vanished into the ether. So at the
time I was like, hey, when this documentary comes out,
maybe we will be able to get enough to do
a whole episode on this person. And it's it evaporated.
I don't I don't know what happens to it. So
if it does come out, there's alway still with possibility.
We'll see. But next step in our impossible episodes is
(05:15):
the London beer flood. And you may remember the episode
in our archive about the Boston molasses flood, which was
back in the era of Katie and Sarah in nif
of that in Boston's North End ber sending a fifteen
foot wave of molasses that ripped buildings off their foundations
and killed more than twenty people and also injured another
(05:35):
one hundred and fifty. So the London beer flood was
a lot like that, except that it was beer, and
it was about a hundred years earlier, and it's also
we have a similar amount of information about it as
about the Boston molasses flood, except that episode on the
Boston Molasses flood is from back when the podcast was
(05:55):
only fifteen minutes long. Yeah, there was a lot us
flushing out of all of the details at that point.
And so for the London beer flood. On October seventeenth,
eighteen fourteen, a three story tall beer vat of fermenting
beer broke at a brewery and unleashed a fifteen foot
high wave of porter and as the wave roared through
(06:17):
the brewery, it broke taps off other vats, which caused
a chain reaction that then flooded the surrounding area with beer.
Some sources report this having happened at the Horseshew Brewery
on Tottenham Court Road, and other sources say it was
the Mrs Henry mu and Company on Bainbridge Street. So
(06:37):
to kind of solve that mystery, those two streets intersect
with each other, uh And the second the Mew Brothers
bought the brewery in eighteen forty one, so this is
sort of two different ways of describing the same brewery.
And eight people were killed in the beer flood and
many buildings were destroyed. There was no drainage in the streets,
(06:57):
so the beer basically had nowhere to go except through
people's homes, so it just went right into them and
right through them. And two of those people that were
killed for a mother and daughter who were having tea
in their home and then were swept away. Five more
were a family who had been killed in their basement
while they were in the process of mourning their two
year old child who had just died. A brick wall
(07:19):
collapsed and killed another woman named Eleanor Cooper. There was
an inquest after has happened. One of the hoops holding
the vat together had actually broken and slipped off earlier
in the day, but apparently this wasn't a really unusual occurrence.
It happened sometimes and they would go and fix it.
When George Crick, who was a seventeen year employee of
(07:40):
the brewery, reported the incident to his boss, he was
told that it would not be a problem and he
was instructed to delegate replacing the hoop to a different employee.
The inquest determined that this was an act of God
and the brewery was cleared of all around doing. There
were no restitutions paid, and actually the taxes is that
the brewery had previously paid on the beer that it
(08:03):
was brewing were waived. One of the longstanding rumors about
this flood is that people rushed to the streets with
pots and pans to try to get free beer. This
is almost certainly false and probably stems from an effort
to sort of insult the people living there, because many
of them were Irish. The brewery did eventually resume operations,
(08:25):
but then it closed in n one, the two hundredth
anniversary of the London Beer Flood was in and at
that point there was this just huge number of articles
that came out about it, and I was really hopeful
at that point that hey, we'll have enough information to
do a whole episode now, But all the articles basically
said the facts that we just told you. There wasn't
(08:46):
a lot of additional information that came out around the
two hundredth anniversary. So the middle part of this episode
is going to cover two subjects that have brought on
a load of request, but they are really really difficult
to substantially. So before we dive into those, Tracy, do
you want to pause for a word from a sponsor, Well,
let's do that, alrighty. We've gotten several requests to talk
(09:09):
about Edward more Drake, and we got a lot more
after he was a character in the most recent season
of American Horror Story. But if you take all the
supposedly out of Edward Mordraake story, there's not a lot
of words left in it. So what we do know
supposedly is that Edward Murderke was the son of an
(09:31):
upper class or noble family in England, and he's said
to have been rather a good looking man, except for
the fact that he had a second face on the
back of his head. The most lengthy documentation we have
of this is from Curiosities of Medicine, being an encyclopedic
collection of rare and extraordinary cases and the most striking
(09:51):
instances of abnormality in all branches of medicine and surgery,
derived from an exhaustive research of medical literature from its
origin to the present day, abstracted, classified, annotated, and indexed,
and that is by George M. Gould and Walter L. Pyle,
and that came out at about eighteen nineties six. So
that entry goes. The following well known story of Edward Mordrake,
(10:14):
though taken from lay sources, is of sufficient notoriety and
interest to be mentioned here. Quote one of the weirdest
as well as most melancholy stories of human deformity, is
that of Edward mor Drake, said to have been heir
to one of the noblest peerages in England. He never
claimed the title, however, and committed suicide in his twenty
third year. He lived in complete seclusion, refusing the visits
(10:37):
even of the members of his own family. He was
a young man of fine attainments, a profound scholar, and
a musician of rare ability. His figure was remarkable for
its grace and his face. That is to say, his
natural faith was that of an antinous But upon the
back of his head was another faith, that of a
beautiful girl, lovely as a dream, hideous as a devil.
(11:00):
The female face was a mere mask, occupying only a
small portion of the posterior part of the skull, yet
exhibiting every sign of intelligence of a malignant sort. However,
it would be seen to smile and sneer while more
Drake was weeping. The eyes would follow the movements of
the spectator, and the lips would jibber without ceasing. No
(11:21):
voice was audible, but more Drake aversed that he was
kept from his rest at night by the hateful whispers
of his devil twin, as he called it, which never sleeps,
but talks to me forever of such things as they
only speak of in hell. No imagination can conceive the
dreadful temptations it sets before me, for some unforgiven wickedness
of my forefathers. I am knit to this fiend. For
(11:43):
a fiend it surely is. I beg and beseech you
to crush it out of human semblance, even if I
die for it. Such were the words of the hapless
more Drake to man version treadwill has physicians. In spite
of careful watching, he managed to procure poison whereof he died,
leaving a letter requesting that the demon face might be
destroyed before his burial quote lest it continues, it's dreadful
(12:07):
whisperings in my grave. At his own request, he was
interred in a waste place, without stone or legend to
mark his grave. And we wanted to point out that
there are variations on spelling. So if you go look
at this, this is a transcription uh in. In this
particular one that we read, they leave the R out
of more drake, so it's more dick. So you may
(12:28):
see it either way. If you go looking like it
show notes or whatnot. So, Uh, there are a number
of conditions that can cause someone's who appear to have
a second face or like remnants of facial structures. Um,
but what these two doctors, they were really doctors, the
(12:50):
guys he writes this book. Uh, what they are reporting
is something that this guy supposedly said to two different physicians,
and it all sounds the tone is more like rumor
than actual medical evidence. The whole thing goes into like
the probably apocryphal category. There's just not there's no real documentation.
(13:15):
And it's very convenient that he says he was buried
with no stone or no marker, Like we have no
way to prove that this person ever actually existed because
all we have to go on is this third party account. Yeah,
it's it's such a compelling story and I know people
love it, but it also when you kind of break
it down, it reads like a checklist of all of
the the vital elements of any sort of juicy, Like
(13:40):
it's you can't substantiate it, and the details are baked
into the story that you can't substantiate it, Like no,
and he will never be found because he didn't want
to be found. It was grave is unmarked, and no,
his doctors told us, but we don't really know those doctors,
and so it's all, yeah, it's not going to happen.
Our next story is similarly a story that people really
(14:02):
really love a whole lot. But we've gotten a lot
of requests for a lot of them come in around Halloween,
but they come in through the rest of the year also,
And these are for Robert the Haunted Doll, who is
sometimes also called Robert the Enchanted Doll, and in the
words of the Key West Art and Historical Society quote,
Robert is a one of a kind, handmade doll created
(14:24):
around the turn of the twentieth century, standing forty inches
tall and stuffed with woodwool known as Excelsior. He is
dressed in a sailor suit at once for painted features
not unlike those of a jester. So, just to be
pretty upfront, this thing looks creepy. Um. The paint is
worn off of its face, so it has creepy flat
(14:46):
black eyes, and the nose and mouth are sort of
hard to define from the rest of the face. It's
got this wooden head that's also got some pitting in it,
so the whole thing is a little bit unsettling and
unnerving to behold. Yeah, I think a lot of people
find old dolls creepy. This is a very old doll,
and then it has this creepy story to go along
(15:08):
with it. Robert was a gift given to a little
boy named Robert Eugene Otto, who later became known as
Gene rather than Robert, and it was given to him
when he was four years old. This was in nineteen
o four, and it's a little There are different accounts
of exactly who gave it to him. The original origin
and all the stories as the Bahamas, but it's not
(15:29):
quite clear whether it was the maid who was from
the Bahamas or if it was the maid's daughter, because
some people report that it was a little girl. Either way,
the doll is about the same size as Jean himself
was at the time, and Jeane named the doll Robert
after himself. Jean also gave Robert his own room in
(15:50):
the attic with his own toys, and he eventually started
blaming this doll for his own misbehavior. Eventually, Robert took
the blame for anything unwelcome that happened to Jeane, and
along the way. Other people who were not Jeane started
reporting weird things about the doll. People looking through the
window from the street said that they would see it
(16:10):
move from one side of the attic turret to another.
People inside the house said that they could hear it
walking around and giggling above them while they were downstairs,
and some people even said that they saw the doll
the dolls expression change as though it was listening to
their conversations. Jean eventually became an artist, you know. He
(16:31):
grew up, and he married, and his wife is reported
to have hated the doll and demanded that it be
locked in a chest. Eventually, after both Jean and his
wife died, their home was made into the Artist House Hotel.
Myrtle Reuter, who bought the home in nineteen seventy four,
donated the doll to the East Martello Museum twenty years later,
(16:52):
and the doll was on display at the museum, which
is an old fort, and the doll also has its
bear with him. Museum staff reported that dirty cameras and
other electronics often failed around the doll. Museum patrons have
written him letters of apology after taking his photograph without
having permission, and then they would experience bad luck later.
(17:12):
All of this sounds pretty underwhelming, considering that a lot
of the blog posts that you find about Robert uh
describe the doll as evil or possessed or the most
haunted doll in history. Those kinds of posts aren't generally
those sorts of things we can use as sources for
the podcast. And what we do know about the doll
for sure is that it's a doll, and it creeps
(17:32):
people out. And I will admit that, I though I'm
still a little nervous talking about Robert without his permission,
Really I hope nothing bad befalls us. That sort of
makes me chuckle, because usually I'm the more superstitious of
the two of us, and I don't have it for
this one. Well, ghost stories scare me, even though I
(17:53):
would follow myself generally skeptical about such things. Interesting, we've
all learned a little about Tracy today before we get
to the next two stories that are particularly wacky. Do
you want to take another word from a sponsor to
get back to our last two impossible episodes? These are
(18:14):
also hard to substantiate, but they're not nearly as paranormal
in their origin as the two that we had before
the break. We're going to start first with the lost
Army of camp by Ses. And this actually was a
really welcome suggestion the first time that we got it,
because I had been looking for some interesting ancient history
to talk about. Uh, and so I got this, and
(18:34):
I was very excited. And then as soon as I
looked into it, I went, that's not going to work.
Greek historian Herodotus wrote about camp by Ses to sending
an army of fifty thousand soldiers on a mission to
destroy the Oracle of Ammon. And this is the same
oracle that Alexander the Great later visited. He did that
in the year three thirty two BC. After this visit,
(18:57):
Alexander the Great reportedly started to think of himself as
the Sun of Ammon. And this particular event purportedly happened
almost two hundred years prior to Alexander's visit. The oracle
had refused to recognize Cambyses as sovereign over Egypt, so
Cambyses sent an army out from Thieves to the oasis
(19:18):
of Siwah, where the Temple of Ammon was located, to
destroy the oracle. But the army never arrived. So here's
what Herodotus had to say about that. As for those
who were sent to march against the Ammonians, as they
set out and journeyed from thieves with guides, and it
is known that they came to the city of Oasis,
inhabited by the Samians, said to be of the Ascreonian tribe,
(19:41):
seven days march from Thebes across sandy desert. This place
is called in the Greek language Islands of the Blessed.
Thus far it is said the army came after that.
Except for the Ammonians themselves and those who heard from them,
no man can say anything of them, for they neither
reached the Ammonians nor were turned back. But this is
(20:01):
what the Ammonians themselves say that when Persians were crossing
the sand from Oasis, probably the oasis of Carga, to
attack them, and we're about midway between their country and oasis.
While they were breakfasting, a great and violent south wind arose,
which buried them in the masses of sand which it bore,
and so they disappeared from sight. Such is the Ammonian
(20:23):
tail of this army. And that's most of all we
know about it a sandstorm buried in army, maybe, but
a lot of historians think the whole thing is completely apocryphal.
Every once in a while, researchers will find in scare
quotes the army. Usually what they have found is some
(20:43):
shards of pottery and some bones. Some of these finds
are outright hoaxes, and others have been a little more substantive,
like there really is pottery and there really are bones,
but often they're The research itself is still questionable in
some way, like people have gone and done they're searching
without actually getting permission to be in Egypt in the
(21:07):
first place, and then they've presented findings as a documentary
film rather than through the typical channels that you announce
academic findings, like through a journal that is subject to
peer review. Lastly on our list of six impossible episodes
is Julie Darbignen. We get a lot of request for her.
(21:29):
She's portrayed as a swashbuckling, cross dressing bisexual opera singer
with romantic adventures to rival Casanova's, which is pretty exciting.
Lots of the most lots of the more recent requests
are also accompanied with a link to the post that
was written about her at the Rejected Princess's blog. Here's
(21:50):
a snippet of her entry in Curiosities of Biography or
Memoirs of Wonderful and Extraordinary Characters, which came out in
eighteen forty five. This female, who acquired extraordinary celebrity as
a singer in France in the seventeenth century, was one
of the numerous instances in which a stage heroin, fortified
by public favor and presuming on the magic of a
(22:13):
melodious voice, defied the laws and institutions of a country
by which she was supported, and committed with impunity, crimes
which would have doomed a common unaccomplished desperado an ignominious death.
This romantic and indecorous adventurer, who dressed, fought and made love,
and conquered like a man, having been married at an
(22:34):
early age. Fortunately for her husband, Monsieur Manpaq, quitted him
a few months after their nuptials for the superior attractions
of a fencing master, a weapon which she afterwards handled
with destructive dexterity against many antagonists. While today's accounts of
her tend to talk about her escapades pretty gleefully. Earlier
(22:55):
retellings are unsurprisingly a bit less glowing. In this particular,
her account goes on to describe her wooing a young
lady and then when that young lady had second thoughts,
burning down her house which is where Lampin was staying,
abducting her, and then holding her captive until they were discovered.
The trouble with an episode on Lama Pan is that
(23:16):
even the accounts of her from that time that she lived,
which was roughly sixteen seventy to seventeen o seven, really
read a lot more like rumor than a factual account.
And while there are a couple of thorough looking blog
posts about her, some of them are quite lengthy. Mostly
they are sourced in kind of bits and pieces from introductions,
(23:37):
footnotes and asides and other works. There's at least one
novel about her. But we can't use fiction as a
source for our history podcast because history and fiction are
two different things sort of. I mean, you could make
an argument that all history is in some way fictitious,
but a novel is not a source that we could
(23:59):
use about someone's life. Yeah, since novels really generally make
no assertion of historical accuracy, like they're not held to
that same standard. It's just not a viable source to use.
You can mention it. We've mentioned it in other episodes
where we go there's just novel about it, and there's
just interesting info that may or may not be true,
But we can't really use it as a primary source. No,
(24:21):
unless we're unless our episode is about the person who
wrote the novel, then it's totally is relevant and absolutely
no shade to rejected Princesses in that assessment, Like rejected
Princesses is awesome. I love that blog, but for our purposes,
we need a little bit you were layers of according
to so and so between us and the subject before
(24:44):
we can really talk about it really well. Um, we
get so many episodes, are so many requests about her.
They're just like, I love her, she sounds awesome, doesn't
sound awesome? You should do an episode on her. Sounds awesome?
And I'm like, she does sound awesome, sounds super awesome.
She sounds super awesome. Uh, but I I you know,
I can't really build a podcast episode on a blog
(25:05):
post that is sourcing footnotes of other books that I
can't go and read for myself. For various reasons. So
those are six things that we get requests for all
the time but are impossible to do. Hold up the
whole episodes on at least at this point. Yes, So
hopefully this gave you a little bit of satisfaction those
(25:25):
of you that are yearning for those episodes, I hope.
So I also have some listener mails to send. This
message is from Ethan. Ethan says, I thought you might
be interested in the following bit of info about the
Iroquois Theater fire. Architect Louis Gonzil investigated the Iroquois Theater
fire and was granted full access to the site beginning
(25:46):
the morning after the tragedy. Since he found it quote
impossible to obtain plans or specifications of the structure, he
measured the building, reconstructed the plans, and photographed various sections
of the theater. This took weeks and his inspection was exhaustive.
His findings were dated January twentieth, nineteen o four. Mr
(26:07):
Gonzelle attended the court proceedings following the disaster and quote
was greatly surprised to see that, notwithstanding the many faults
and defects in the planning of the theater and the
unparalleled negligence displayed in its supervision and operation. All of
the suits ended in verdicts not guilty. His paper was
never meant for publication, but after years of discussions with
(26:28):
eyewitnesses and conversations at memorial meetings, he concluded that quote
actual conditions prevalent in the theater at the time of
the fire have been maliciously withheld from the public by
clever and successful manipulation. He published his paper in ninety five,
and the Theater Historical Society of America republished it in
booklet form. In Anyone looking for details about how the
(26:51):
tragedy reached the proportions it did should look for this
booklet or contact the Theater Historical Society. I think some
of my sources quoted from the booklet, but I did
not personally read the booklet myself, So I'm glad to
know that that's a thing you can still get your
hands on looking for more information about that. So thank you, Ethan.
(27:12):
If you would like to write to us about this
or any other episode, you can't. We're at History Podcast
that How Stuffworks dot com. We're also on Facebook at
Facebook dot com, slash miss in History and on Twitter
at miss in History, are tumbler is missin History dot
tumbler dot com, and are also on panterrist at priest
dot com slash missed in History. We have a spread
short store where you can get shirts and phone cases
(27:32):
and other cool stuff. It isn't missed in History dot
spreadshirt dot com. If you would like to learn a
little bit more about something that came up in today's episode,
you can come to our parent companies website that is
how Stuffworks dot com. Put the word beer into the
search bar you will find the article how Beer Works.
You can also come to our website where we have
an art five of every episode we've ever done, show
(27:53):
notes for all the ones from the last couple of years,
lots of other cool stuff that is at mist in
history dot com. So you can do all that and
a whole lot more at how stuff works dot com
or miss industry dot com for more onness and thousands
of other topics because it how stuff works dot com.
M M M
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy D. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. Over the
last couple of years the Holly and I have been
on this show, we have gotten literally hundreds and hundreds
(00:21):
of requests from listeners, and maybe five percent of them
are requests that we get over and over and over
and over again, And unfortunately a handful of those most
requested episodes are also ones that we can't really do
a whole show on. Sometimes there's just not enough information
available about the thing. Sometimes the information exists somewhere, but
(00:47):
there's not a way that we can really get to it.
It's either uh, not in a language that we speak,
or it's so spread out among so many different things
that it would take way more time than we can
really put into a show that puts out two new
episodes in a week. Or sometimes they're just there's information,
but it's so far removed from primary sources that it
(01:11):
just doesn't feel that reliable. Occasionally we actually get emails
from people who kind of go, I want you to
do an episode on this. I know the information is
out there, because my friend is doing his master's thesis
on it, and I'm just gonna go ahead and put
it out there. We cannot do a master's thesis level
of work for a podcast that comes out twice a week.
We would be on like a Dan Carlin hardcore history
(01:33):
kind of schedule if if that were the time that
we could put into every episode. So what we're gonna
do today is to take six of these things that
are impossible to do an episode on their own, and
we're gonna just run through them in one show. So
that is our six impossible episodes for today. So first up,
we're gonna talk about Mary Fields, who is also known
(01:55):
as Stagecoach Mary. And this is a person who a
lot of people here about for the first time through
a post on Badass of the Week, which, if you're
not familiar with that site, the language is a bit blue,
so maybe do not google it after this episode and
read it allowed to an elementary school class or other
small children, etcetera. Here's what we do know about Stagecoach Mary.
(02:17):
She was born a slave in Tennessee in eighteen thirty
two and was owned by a family called the Dunns.
She had one of the Dunn's daughters Dolly basically grew
up together, and Mary learned to read and write while
she was still a slave. After slavery was abolished, she
moved to Toledo, Ohio with Dolly Dunn, who was going
there to become a nun. Dolly Dunn became known as
(02:41):
Mother Amadeus, and she eventually moved to Cascade, Montana to
teach at a school for Native American children. For a while,
Mary stayed behind in Ohio, but when Mother Amadeus became
extremely ill, they sent for her. Mother Amadeus eventually got better,
and Mary stayed in Cascade. Did odd jobs around St.
(03:01):
Peter's Mission, and she basically acted as a protector for
the nuns. She also got a job delivering the mail
by stagecoach, which made her the first African American woman
to work delivering US mail. And we talk in our
Charlie Parkhurst episode about what a demanding and dangerous job
stagecoach driving was, and Mary apparently took to it tremendously.
(03:24):
She was extremely reliable as a driver, and she developed
a reputation for fighting, brawling, and taking guph from absolutely
no one. Uh There are a number of stories of
her knocking men out with one blow under a variety
of circumstances, and this is also why she wound up
not working for the convent anymore. Uh. It was the
combination of her personality and her work that earned her
(03:46):
that nickname Stagecoach Mary. Eventually she retired from stagecoach driving
and opened a laundry and she became a really beloved
figure in Cascade, which actually made her birthday a holiday.
And stage Coach Mary died in nineteen fourteen. She was
eighty two at the time, and she is buried just
outside Cascade, Montana. In terms of information about her, there's
(04:09):
a children's book about her, as well as a documentary
called Discovering Mary, and that's by a woman named Joyce Fitzpatrick.
I haven't seen the film itself, but she talks about
picking up tidbits of information for years before making the film,
and the film itself actually started out more as a
documentary of her recording her own process of looking for
(04:30):
more information about Mary Fields. So when for People first
started asking us to do an episode about stage Coach Mary,
there was actually a crowdfunding project in the works somewhere
about a documentary. I'm not sure if it was this
documentary or a different one. But now almost two years
later when I went looking for it again, all traces
(04:52):
of that have vanished into the ether. So at the
time I was like, hey, when this documentary comes out,
maybe we will be able to get enough to do
a whole episode on this person. And it's it evaporated.
I don't I don't know what happens to it. So
if it does come out, there's alway still with possibility.
We'll see. But next step in our impossible episodes is
(05:15):
the London beer flood. And you may remember the episode
in our archive about the Boston molasses flood, which was
back in the era of Katie and Sarah in nif
of that in Boston's North End ber sending a fifteen
foot wave of molasses that ripped buildings off their foundations
and killed more than twenty people and also injured another
(05:35):
one hundred and fifty. So the London beer flood was
a lot like that, except that it was beer, and
it was about a hundred years earlier, and it's also
we have a similar amount of information about it as
about the Boston molasses flood, except that episode on the
Boston Molasses flood is from back when the podcast was
(05:55):
only fifteen minutes long. Yeah, there was a lot us
flushing out of all of the details at that point.
And so for the London beer flood. On October seventeenth,
eighteen fourteen, a three story tall beer vat of fermenting
beer broke at a brewery and unleashed a fifteen foot
high wave of porter and as the wave roared through
(06:17):
the brewery, it broke taps off other vats, which caused
a chain reaction that then flooded the surrounding area with beer.
Some sources report this having happened at the Horseshew Brewery
on Tottenham Court Road, and other sources say it was
the Mrs Henry mu and Company on Bainbridge Street. So
(06:37):
to kind of solve that mystery, those two streets intersect
with each other, uh And the second the Mew Brothers
bought the brewery in eighteen forty one, so this is
sort of two different ways of describing the same brewery.
And eight people were killed in the beer flood and
many buildings were destroyed. There was no drainage in the streets,
(06:57):
so the beer basically had nowhere to go except through
people's homes, so it just went right into them and
right through them. And two of those people that were
killed for a mother and daughter who were having tea
in their home and then were swept away. Five more
were a family who had been killed in their basement
while they were in the process of mourning their two
year old child who had just died. A brick wall
(07:19):
collapsed and killed another woman named Eleanor Cooper. There was
an inquest after has happened. One of the hoops holding
the vat together had actually broken and slipped off earlier
in the day, but apparently this wasn't a really unusual occurrence.
It happened sometimes and they would go and fix it.
When George Crick, who was a seventeen year employee of
(07:40):
the brewery, reported the incident to his boss, he was
told that it would not be a problem and he
was instructed to delegate replacing the hoop to a different employee.
The inquest determined that this was an act of God
and the brewery was cleared of all around doing. There
were no restitutions paid, and actually the taxes is that
the brewery had previously paid on the beer that it
(08:03):
was brewing were waived. One of the longstanding rumors about
this flood is that people rushed to the streets with
pots and pans to try to get free beer. This
is almost certainly false and probably stems from an effort
to sort of insult the people living there, because many
of them were Irish. The brewery did eventually resume operations,
(08:25):
but then it closed in n one, the two hundredth
anniversary of the London Beer Flood was in and at
that point there was this just huge number of articles
that came out about it, and I was really hopeful
at that point that hey, we'll have enough information to
do a whole episode now, But all the articles basically
said the facts that we just told you. There wasn't
(08:46):
a lot of additional information that came out around the
two hundredth anniversary. So the middle part of this episode
is going to cover two subjects that have brought on
a load of request, but they are really really difficult
to substantially. So before we dive into those, Tracy, do
you want to pause for a word from a sponsor, Well,
let's do that, alrighty. We've gotten several requests to talk
(09:09):
about Edward more Drake, and we got a lot more
after he was a character in the most recent season
of American Horror Story. But if you take all the
supposedly out of Edward Mordraake story, there's not a lot
of words left in it. So what we do know
supposedly is that Edward Murderke was the son of an
(09:31):
upper class or noble family in England, and he's said
to have been rather a good looking man, except for
the fact that he had a second face on the
back of his head. The most lengthy documentation we have
of this is from Curiosities of Medicine, being an encyclopedic
collection of rare and extraordinary cases and the most striking
(09:51):
instances of abnormality in all branches of medicine and surgery,
derived from an exhaustive research of medical literature from its
origin to the present day, abstracted, classified, annotated, and indexed,
and that is by George M. Gould and Walter L. Pyle,
and that came out at about eighteen nineties six. So
that entry goes. The following well known story of Edward Mordrake,
(10:14):
though taken from lay sources, is of sufficient notoriety and
interest to be mentioned here. Quote one of the weirdest
as well as most melancholy stories of human deformity, is
that of Edward mor Drake, said to have been heir
to one of the noblest peerages in England. He never
claimed the title, however, and committed suicide in his twenty
third year. He lived in complete seclusion, refusing the visits
(10:37):
even of the members of his own family. He was
a young man of fine attainments, a profound scholar, and
a musician of rare ability. His figure was remarkable for
its grace and his face. That is to say, his
natural faith was that of an antinous But upon the
back of his head was another faith, that of a
beautiful girl, lovely as a dream, hideous as a devil.
(11:00):
The female face was a mere mask, occupying only a
small portion of the posterior part of the skull, yet
exhibiting every sign of intelligence of a malignant sort. However,
it would be seen to smile and sneer while more
Drake was weeping. The eyes would follow the movements of
the spectator, and the lips would jibber without ceasing. No
(11:21):
voice was audible, but more Drake aversed that he was
kept from his rest at night by the hateful whispers
of his devil twin, as he called it, which never sleeps,
but talks to me forever of such things as they
only speak of in hell. No imagination can conceive the
dreadful temptations it sets before me, for some unforgiven wickedness
of my forefathers. I am knit to this fiend. For
(11:43):
a fiend it surely is. I beg and beseech you
to crush it out of human semblance, even if I
die for it. Such were the words of the hapless
more Drake to man version treadwill has physicians. In spite
of careful watching, he managed to procure poison whereof he died,
leaving a letter requesting that the demon face might be
destroyed before his burial quote lest it continues, it's dreadful
(12:07):
whisperings in my grave. At his own request, he was
interred in a waste place, without stone or legend to
mark his grave. And we wanted to point out that
there are variations on spelling. So if you go look
at this, this is a transcription uh in. In this
particular one that we read, they leave the R out
of more drake, so it's more dick. So you may
(12:28):
see it either way. If you go looking like it
show notes or whatnot. So, Uh, there are a number
of conditions that can cause someone's who appear to have
a second face or like remnants of facial structures. Um,
but what these two doctors, they were really doctors, the
(12:50):
guys he writes this book. Uh, what they are reporting
is something that this guy supposedly said to two different physicians,
and it all sounds the tone is more like rumor
than actual medical evidence. The whole thing goes into like
the probably apocryphal category. There's just not there's no real documentation.
(13:15):
And it's very convenient that he says he was buried
with no stone or no marker, Like we have no
way to prove that this person ever actually existed because
all we have to go on is this third party account. Yeah,
it's it's such a compelling story and I know people
love it, but it also when you kind of break
it down, it reads like a checklist of all of
the the vital elements of any sort of juicy, Like
(13:40):
it's you can't substantiate it, and the details are baked
into the story that you can't substantiate it, Like no,
and he will never be found because he didn't want
to be found. It was grave is unmarked, and no,
his doctors told us, but we don't really know those doctors,
and so it's all, yeah, it's not going to happen.
Our next story is similarly a story that people really
(14:02):
really love a whole lot. But we've gotten a lot
of requests for a lot of them come in around Halloween,
but they come in through the rest of the year also,
And these are for Robert the Haunted Doll, who is
sometimes also called Robert the Enchanted Doll, and in the
words of the Key West Art and Historical Society quote,
Robert is a one of a kind, handmade doll created
(14:24):
around the turn of the twentieth century, standing forty inches
tall and stuffed with woodwool known as Excelsior. He is
dressed in a sailor suit at once for painted features
not unlike those of a jester. So, just to be
pretty upfront, this thing looks creepy. Um. The paint is
worn off of its face, so it has creepy flat
(14:46):
black eyes, and the nose and mouth are sort of
hard to define from the rest of the face. It's
got this wooden head that's also got some pitting in it,
so the whole thing is a little bit unsettling and
unnerving to behold. Yeah, I think a lot of people
find old dolls creepy. This is a very old doll,
and then it has this creepy story to go along
(15:08):
with it. Robert was a gift given to a little
boy named Robert Eugene Otto, who later became known as
Gene rather than Robert, and it was given to him
when he was four years old. This was in nineteen
o four, and it's a little There are different accounts
of exactly who gave it to him. The original origin
and all the stories as the Bahamas, but it's not
(15:29):
quite clear whether it was the maid who was from
the Bahamas or if it was the maid's daughter, because
some people report that it was a little girl. Either way,
the doll is about the same size as Jean himself
was at the time, and Jeane named the doll Robert
after himself. Jean also gave Robert his own room in
(15:50):
the attic with his own toys, and he eventually started
blaming this doll for his own misbehavior. Eventually, Robert took
the blame for anything unwelcome that happened to Jeane, and
along the way. Other people who were not Jeane started
reporting weird things about the doll. People looking through the
window from the street said that they would see it
(16:10):
move from one side of the attic turret to another.
People inside the house said that they could hear it
walking around and giggling above them while they were downstairs,
and some people even said that they saw the doll
the dolls expression change as though it was listening to
their conversations. Jean eventually became an artist, you know. He
(16:31):
grew up, and he married, and his wife is reported
to have hated the doll and demanded that it be
locked in a chest. Eventually, after both Jean and his
wife died, their home was made into the Artist House Hotel.
Myrtle Reuter, who bought the home in nineteen seventy four,
donated the doll to the East Martello Museum twenty years later,
(16:52):
and the doll was on display at the museum, which
is an old fort, and the doll also has its
bear with him. Museum staff reported that dirty cameras and
other electronics often failed around the doll. Museum patrons have
written him letters of apology after taking his photograph without
having permission, and then they would experience bad luck later.
(17:12):
All of this sounds pretty underwhelming, considering that a lot
of the blog posts that you find about Robert uh
describe the doll as evil or possessed or the most
haunted doll in history. Those kinds of posts aren't generally
those sorts of things we can use as sources for
the podcast. And what we do know about the doll
for sure is that it's a doll, and it creeps
(17:32):
people out. And I will admit that, I though I'm
still a little nervous talking about Robert without his permission,
Really I hope nothing bad befalls us. That sort of
makes me chuckle, because usually I'm the more superstitious of
the two of us, and I don't have it for
this one. Well, ghost stories scare me, even though I
(17:53):
would follow myself generally skeptical about such things. Interesting, we've
all learned a little about Tracy today before we get
to the next two stories that are particularly wacky. Do
you want to take another word from a sponsor to
get back to our last two impossible episodes? These are
(18:14):
also hard to substantiate, but they're not nearly as paranormal
in their origin as the two that we had before
the break. We're going to start first with the lost
Army of camp by Ses. And this actually was a
really welcome suggestion the first time that we got it,
because I had been looking for some interesting ancient history
to talk about. Uh, and so I got this, and
(18:34):
I was very excited. And then as soon as I
looked into it, I went, that's not going to work.
Greek historian Herodotus wrote about camp by Ses to sending
an army of fifty thousand soldiers on a mission to
destroy the Oracle of Ammon. And this is the same
oracle that Alexander the Great later visited. He did that
in the year three thirty two BC. After this visit,
(18:57):
Alexander the Great reportedly started to think of himself as
the Sun of Ammon. And this particular event purportedly happened
almost two hundred years prior to Alexander's visit. The oracle
had refused to recognize Cambyses as sovereign over Egypt, so
Cambyses sent an army out from Thieves to the oasis
(19:18):
of Siwah, where the Temple of Ammon was located, to
destroy the oracle. But the army never arrived. So here's
what Herodotus had to say about that. As for those
who were sent to march against the Ammonians, as they
set out and journeyed from thieves with guides, and it
is known that they came to the city of Oasis,
inhabited by the Samians, said to be of the Ascreonian tribe,
(19:41):
seven days march from Thebes across sandy desert. This place
is called in the Greek language Islands of the Blessed.
Thus far it is said the army came after that.
Except for the Ammonians themselves and those who heard from them,
no man can say anything of them, for they neither
reached the Ammonians nor were turned back. But this is
(20:01):
what the Ammonians themselves say that when Persians were crossing
the sand from Oasis, probably the oasis of Carga, to
attack them, and we're about midway between their country and oasis.
While they were breakfasting, a great and violent south wind arose,
which buried them in the masses of sand which it bore,
and so they disappeared from sight. Such is the Ammonian
(20:23):
tail of this army. And that's most of all we
know about it a sandstorm buried in army, maybe, but
a lot of historians think the whole thing is completely apocryphal.
Every once in a while, researchers will find in scare
quotes the army. Usually what they have found is some
(20:43):
shards of pottery and some bones. Some of these finds
are outright hoaxes, and others have been a little more substantive,
like there really is pottery and there really are bones,
but often they're The research itself is still questionable in
some way, like people have gone and done they're searching
without actually getting permission to be in Egypt in the
(21:07):
first place, and then they've presented findings as a documentary
film rather than through the typical channels that you announce
academic findings, like through a journal that is subject to
peer review. Lastly on our list of six impossible episodes
is Julie Darbignen. We get a lot of request for her.
(21:29):
She's portrayed as a swashbuckling, cross dressing bisexual opera singer
with romantic adventures to rival Casanova's, which is pretty exciting.
Lots of the most lots of the more recent requests
are also accompanied with a link to the post that
was written about her at the Rejected Princess's blog. Here's
(21:50):
a snippet of her entry in Curiosities of Biography or
Memoirs of Wonderful and Extraordinary Characters, which came out in
eighteen forty five. This female, who acquired extraordinary celebrity as
a singer in France in the seventeenth century, was one
of the numerous instances in which a stage heroin, fortified
by public favor and presuming on the magic of a
(22:13):
melodious voice, defied the laws and institutions of a country
by which she was supported, and committed with impunity, crimes
which would have doomed a common unaccomplished desperado an ignominious death.
This romantic and indecorous adventurer, who dressed, fought and made love,
and conquered like a man, having been married at an
(22:34):
early age. Fortunately for her husband, Monsieur Manpaq, quitted him
a few months after their nuptials for the superior attractions
of a fencing master, a weapon which she afterwards handled
with destructive dexterity against many antagonists. While today's accounts of
her tend to talk about her escapades pretty gleefully. Earlier
(22:55):
retellings are unsurprisingly a bit less glowing. In this particular,
her account goes on to describe her wooing a young
lady and then when that young lady had second thoughts,
burning down her house which is where Lampin was staying,
abducting her, and then holding her captive until they were discovered.
The trouble with an episode on Lama Pan is that
(23:16):
even the accounts of her from that time that she lived,
which was roughly sixteen seventy to seventeen o seven, really
read a lot more like rumor than a factual account.
And while there are a couple of thorough looking blog
posts about her, some of them are quite lengthy. Mostly
they are sourced in kind of bits and pieces from introductions,
(23:37):
footnotes and asides and other works. There's at least one
novel about her. But we can't use fiction as a
source for our history podcast because history and fiction are
two different things sort of. I mean, you could make
an argument that all history is in some way fictitious,
but a novel is not a source that we could
(23:59):
use about someone's life. Yeah, since novels really generally make
no assertion of historical accuracy, like they're not held to
that same standard. It's just not a viable source to use.
You can mention it. We've mentioned it in other episodes
where we go there's just novel about it, and there's
just interesting info that may or may not be true,
But we can't really use it as a primary source. No,
(24:21):
unless we're unless our episode is about the person who
wrote the novel, then it's totally is relevant and absolutely
no shade to rejected Princesses in that assessment, Like rejected
Princesses is awesome. I love that blog, but for our purposes,
we need a little bit you were layers of according
to so and so between us and the subject before
(24:44):
we can really talk about it really well. Um, we
get so many episodes, are so many requests about her.
They're just like, I love her, she sounds awesome, doesn't
sound awesome? You should do an episode on her. Sounds awesome?
And I'm like, she does sound awesome, sounds super awesome.
She sounds super awesome. Uh, but I I you know,
I can't really build a podcast episode on a blog
(25:05):
post that is sourcing footnotes of other books that I
can't go and read for myself. For various reasons. So
those are six things that we get requests for all
the time but are impossible to do. Hold up the
whole episodes on at least at this point. Yes, So
hopefully this gave you a little bit of satisfaction those
(25:25):
of you that are yearning for those episodes, I hope.
So I also have some listener mails to send. This
message is from Ethan. Ethan says, I thought you might
be interested in the following bit of info about the
Iroquois Theater fire. Architect Louis Gonzil investigated the Iroquois Theater
fire and was granted full access to the site beginning
(25:46):
the morning after the tragedy. Since he found it quote
impossible to obtain plans or specifications of the structure, he
measured the building, reconstructed the plans, and photographed various sections
of the theater. This took weeks and his inspection was exhaustive.
His findings were dated January twentieth, nineteen o four. Mr
(26:07):
Gonzelle attended the court proceedings following the disaster and quote
was greatly surprised to see that, notwithstanding the many faults
and defects in the planning of the theater and the
unparalleled negligence displayed in its supervision and operation. All of
the suits ended in verdicts not guilty. His paper was
never meant for publication, but after years of discussions with
(26:28):
eyewitnesses and conversations at memorial meetings, he concluded that quote
actual conditions prevalent in the theater at the time of
the fire have been maliciously withheld from the public by
clever and successful manipulation. He published his paper in ninety five,
and the Theater Historical Society of America republished it in
booklet form. In Anyone looking for details about how the
(26:51):
tragedy reached the proportions it did should look for this
booklet or contact the Theater Historical Society. I think some
of my sources quoted from the booklet, but I did
not personally read the booklet myself, So I'm glad to
know that that's a thing you can still get your
hands on looking for more information about that. So thank you, Ethan.
(27:12):
If you would like to write to us about this
or any other episode, you can't. We're at History Podcast
that How Stuffworks dot com. We're also on Facebook at
Facebook dot com, slash miss in History and on Twitter
at miss in History, are tumbler is missin History dot
tumbler dot com, and are also on panterrist at priest
dot com slash missed in History. We have a spread
short store where you can get shirts and phone cases
(27:32):
and other cool stuff. It isn't missed in History dot
spreadshirt dot com. If you would like to learn a
little bit more about something that came up in today's episode,
you can come to our parent companies website that is
how Stuffworks dot com. Put the word beer into the
search bar you will find the article how Beer Works.
You can also come to our website where we have
an art five of every episode we've ever done, show
(27:53):
notes for all the ones from the last couple of years,
lots of other cool stuff that is at mist in
history dot com. So you can do all that and
a whole lot more at how stuff works dot com
or miss industry dot com for more onness and thousands
of other topics because it how stuff works dot com.
M M M
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.