SYMHC Classics: New England Vampire Panic

Today, in honor of Halloween weekend, we're revisiting an episode about vampirism. Starting in the late 1700s and, small rural communities in New England were sometimes stricken with a panicked fear that the dead were feeding off the living.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hey, happy Saturday before Halloween. Just like a sub holiday
for me. Yeah, So we thought we would take the
opportunity to get one more creepy episode into your podcast
speed this October. So this one is actually the first
October episode that Holly and I ever did as hosts
on the show, and it is about the New England

(00:23):
vampire panic. And this is a story that's gotten a
lot of attention lately. It played a part in the
first ever episode of the podcast Lore and their new
TV adaptation, so it's definitely a favorite. It's a really
fun series of things to dig into. Welcome to stuff

(00:43):
you missed in history class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. And we are officially into
a little bit the Halloween programming. We're getting there. I
mean I start in July in my personal life, but

(01:04):
I held out till now for the pot just like
tenter Hooks. Barely expect some scary things, scary people coming
up over the next month or so. I just think
they're fascinating, uh, because Halloween is my favorite holiday. Um.
So today we're going to talk about an American phenomenon

(01:26):
that happened for about a hundred years it was going
on in New England where there were these bizarre vampire panics.
And while we live in an age and vampires are
insanely popular as entertainment, uh, and they often become romantic
interests for better or for worse, there have certainly been
times in human history when fear of real and for true,

(01:48):
actual vampiresm caused these outright panics and for people to
really enact some very bizarre rituals to try to quell
this menace that they perceive eaved around them. Every time
we every time there's a news story that floats by
about somebody discovering a quote vampire grave in some place,
we had all these requests from people talk about that. Yeah,

(02:09):
and there have been a lot and we'll talk a
little bit about one researcher who does a lot of
work specifically in that field. Uh. The word vampire, of course,
originated in Slavac Europe in the tenth century, and there
have been a number of vampire panics in Europe as
well throughout history from you know, the tenth century right

(02:29):
up until roughly the end of the eighteenth century. But
at that point it kind of started to fizzle out,
like these instances where people became convinced on mass that
there was a vampire in their midst But as Europeans
were moving to North America, a lot of their superstitions
came along for the ride. And it's in New England
that we're focusing this lens today. Uh. And it's actually

(02:52):
later in the historical record than people might anticipate, because
it does sound, you know, superstition on this level sounds
a little wacky, in a little old fashioned, but it's
a lot more modern than you might think. This was
happening way more recently than I think most people would suspect. Uh.
And So first we're going to cover a couple of
specific instances of vampire panic that happened in New England,

(03:16):
and then we'll discuss some of the causes and circumstances
around this phenomenon that kept repeating. And we're first going
to start in Jewitt City, Connecticut. So in the late
eighteen forties through the mid eighteen fifties in Jewitt City
there's a vampire panic. So the Ray family of Jewett
City experienced this series of tragedies when which healthy members

(03:39):
of the family, previously healthy members of the family just
wasted away, and most of the panic really was in
the eighteen fifties, as this family had begun to lose
more and more members, So it wasn't like a panic
that lasted ten years um, but the events leading up
to it really lasted that long. So first the Ray
family son Lemuel died, and then Henry, who was the

(04:02):
father of the family, passed away a couple of years
after that, so this was late eighteen forties into early
eighteen fifties. And then Elisha was next uh and then
the eldest son of the family, Henry Nelson, and will
refer to him by both names to keep him separate
from the father. Henry also fell sick. So there's a
lot of speculation going on about what was causing all

(04:25):
of these deaths for this one family, and believing that
the dead were somehow feeding on the living. Two of
the Race sons were exhumed on June four. Their bodies
were burned, and this desperate attempt to try to end
the family's suffering. And we don't really know why the

(04:45):
Ray family attributed the later deaths to the buried relatives,
but it appears that they thought that Lemuel and Elisha
were somehow coming back, possibly as spirits, which was part
of the vampire lure at the time, rather than the
modern vampiric cons up of the dead actually rising from
the grave and biting people on the neck, and that
they were draining Henry Nelson, the eldest son. It's unclear

(05:09):
also why their father, Henry was not a suspect in
all of this. There was never any indication that his
grave had been intended to be disturbed, just the two sons.
We also don't know when Henry Nelson died, but it
appears that the tuberculosis outbreak, which was really the culprit,

(05:29):
ended there. So tuberculosis is an infectious disease, as we
know now, was not known app time, and it's spread
through bacteria, So the burning of their bodies might actually
have helped contain the outbreak. Uh So this sort of
solidified this incorrect notion that what they had done had

(05:53):
actually stopped the vampires. Yes, so we know now that
what was going on was that the family had what
was called at the time consumption. And even so, and
we'll talk about it, it comes up a little bit
later that sometimes these cases of consumption were actually identified.
They were diagnosed, but there was an underlying fear about
what was causing the illness, right, and so because uh,

(06:15):
tuberculosis wasn't identified until several decades later, even though consumption
was identified, it was not known that it was bacterial
and that it was contagious. Didn't quite have the germ
theory of disease yet, that was not quite there yet,
barely getting started. And in fact, like the germ theory
didn't really spread like it was just in its infancy

(06:37):
at this point. It wasn't until the nineteen twenties that
that people really had the idea in their heads that
germs caused disease. And even so in more remote areas,
it was entirely possible that that that word would not
have reached people yet absolutely. Uh. And so that's the
Jewitt City vampire case. And you'll sometimes hear them referred to,

(06:58):
there's their tours through own, etcetera. And you'll hear in
um circles of people that like to talk about these
types of things, uh, the Jewish City vampires, even though
they were not actually vampires. Uh. And the next time
we're going to talk about so remember that one was
in the eighteen fifties when that all happened. This one
is a bit later, and it's quite famous. It's the

(07:19):
Mercy Brown case. Uh, and so Mercy Lena Brown and
she went by Lena was a resident of Exeter, Rhode Island,
and she died there in eighteen ninety two, so much
later in the historical record. Right when she died, the
town was really struggling. The Civil War had claimed a
lot of his popular its population, and that was really

(07:41):
the case everywhere, like the Civil War could just eliminate
huge numbers of people from a town's population. The railroad
had also made it really easy for people to leave
the area to try to find better farmland. Yeah, as
a priest side note, Exeter was a farm community, but
it's widely Reckonnied said. The soil there is not great

(08:01):
for farming. That's the case in many parts. It's very rocky.
So yeah, we kind of talked about a similar thing
in our Brook Farm episode that these people set up
a farm in a place that doesn't have a good soil. Right.
So yeah, Exeter was it was a farming community that
got barely got by before all of these deaths and
and people wanting to leave started to happen, and then

(08:22):
it really got rough well, and once the railroad made
it much easier to move a farther distance away, there
wasn't a huge draw for people to stay there, continuing
to struggle to just with another nature right. From eighteen
twenty until the time of Lena's death, the population had
gone from people to nine hundred sixty one. So yeah,

(08:44):
over of course of about seventy years, they lost well
over half of their population. Now, Lena's mother had died
ten years earlier in two and Lena's twenty year old
sister had died the year after their mother, So about
a decade before Lena became sick, two other women in

(09:04):
her family had died, and Lena's brother had become sick
as well, but he left Exeter. He moved to Colorado
Springs in the hopes that a climate change would cure him.
While Lena was dying, her brother, Edwin, came back. He
had had some health improvements for a little while while

(09:24):
he was gone, but eventually he got sick again. So
the story goes that the neighbors, thinking that some sort
of evil, supernatural happening had reversed Edwin's remission when he
came home. Uh they approached Lena's father, whose named George Brown,
and they suggested that an exhimation of the family members
who had already died and at this point Lena had passed,

(09:48):
might lead to his son's recovery. So they thought we
might be able to save Edwin if we dig up
the dead ladies. Right, So their goal was to check
the hearts of the deceased to see if there was
fresh blood in m and that would be an indicator
that the corpse was feeding on the living people. And
George reluctantly agreed to do this. So on March seventeenth,

(10:10):
his wife and his two daughters were unearthed, and I
feel like I should mention George did not believe in
this nonsense, and he refused to be present at the exhamation.
He was really most records indicate he was just trying
to placate his neighbors because they were relentless um and Lena,
of course, had only been dead for about two months

(10:30):
at this time. She died in January, and because it
was winter, she had not decomposed all that much, while
her mother and sister, again having died almost a decade prior,
were just skeletal at that point, they were just bones. Uh.
There was actually a correspondent for the Providence Journal on
hand for this disinterment, and he reported that quote, the

(10:50):
body was in a fairly well preserved state. He's referring
to Lena. At this point, the heart and liver were removed,
and in cutting open the heart, clotted and decomposed blood
was found. The town doctor was also in attendance for this,
as sometimes did happen during these exhumations, and he really
was also trying to be the voice of reason, and
he was like, no, she's got tuberculosis. She has a

(11:14):
long disease. She died of this. She's this is not
a vampire. Um. But of course that kind of fell
on deaf ears, right, Mercy. Lena Brown's liver and heart
were burned. They're on a site, and the ashes were
fed to her brother and attempt to cure him of tuberculitis.
But that of course did not work. No, he died

(11:37):
like two months later. And because this particular vampire panic
happened in the late eighteen hundreds and there was a
reporter on hand to witness it, the story really spread.
It actually ended up being picked up by the American
Anthropologist Journal UH when a gentleman that wrote for them
went to study it after he had read that initial account,

(11:59):
and it ended up being talked about far and wide,
and some historians actually believed that it was the Mercy
Brown story that inspired bram Stoker's Dracula, which published in
although there is some debate over it UM. Some will
say that the news that had spread out that led
to specifics that seemed to parallel bram stoker story, not

(12:20):
all of those specifics had really become public knowledge by
the time he would have been working on it, so
it's a it's an unknown, although there are some interesting
parallels between the two UH. And the general reception of
this story in the press and in public opinion was
that really this was all just because of ignorance of
small communities UH, and it was even characterized by some

(12:43):
as a hoax. By the time the man who wrote
for the American Anthropologist Journal showed up, they thought that
people were kind of pulling his legs UH, and the
Boston Globe actually even suggested that um inbreeding and intermarrying
in Exeter had resulted in this community that was not
so intellectual on that they were kind of prone to
buy into these crazy superstitions, right. Uh so the world

(13:06):
at large thought a lot of this was crazy even
earlier than this story, but uh, you know, these small
communities would get the grip of the panic. As a
side note, there's an episode of The Memory Palace that's
about this specific vampire panic. You all would like to listen,
and it's called Mary, Mary and Mercy. Mercy Brown's story

(13:27):
is really quite famous in the Vampire lower and New
England Law on its own outside of um, you know,
sort of paranormal enthusiasm because it is such so late
in the game that it is a little startling, I
think for people to move on to another story. A
group of children in Griswold, Connecticut stumbled onto a previously

(13:50):
unknown burial ground and there had actually been a serial
killer in the area just prior to this, and because
of that, police investigation was started and the site that
the children had found was excavated because initially they had
just found like some bones, and they weren't police and
the authorities were not sure if they had found a

(14:10):
burial site that this serial killer had been using. But
it turned out that what they had actually unearthed was
an interesting part of this area's history and New England,
for anyone who does not know, is actually filled with
unmarked burial plots left over from the colonial area era,
mostly when families would establish these burial spaces, but they

(14:31):
didn't always keep records of the interments and they had
eventually grown over with age, you know, as as small
townships had fallen away and died off and been replaced
by bigger cities and people moved away. These burial plots
weren't always uh maintained visibly right, So not quite as
far back in history as the many, many, many bodies

(14:53):
that are now under car parks. They were constantly hearing
about from the UK, but kind of similar in how
people buried their loved ones and then moved on for
whatever reason announced something else got there. Eventually, authorities uncovered
twenty nine graves, and most of these were just austere
graves where people had been buried in very simple wooden boxes.

(15:16):
There were fifteen children, six adult males, and eight adult females.
But there were also two stoned crips that the state's
archaeology team, which was led by Nick Bellantoni, were particularly
interested in, and one of these crips, which was labeled
Burial number four. When they were doing the excavation revealed

(15:36):
a much different in tumbment than those that the team
had uncovered up to that point, and instead of finding
a body laid out simply in a wooden box with
the arms either crossed over the chest or at the side,
this had a coffin which was painted red and it
had the initials j B in the number fifty five
laid out on the lid in brass tacks. And while

(15:58):
the feet of the deceased were exactly where you would
expect to find them in the coffin, the rest of
the body had been completely rearranged into a layout that
was similar to a Jolly Roger, but with the skull
turned face down into the rib cage and then the
leg and arm bones forming the cross underneath that. So
analysis indicated that the beheading and the fracturing of the

(16:20):
ribs and the dismemberment of the body had all happened
several years after this JB had died. Paleopathological evidence also
revealed that JB had probably died of consumption, and two
other sets of remains near JB, which were labeled IB.
The number forty six, and n B with the number thirteen,

(16:41):
which we believe to be age indicators, had also died
of tuberculosis. Ib A was a woman and n B
was a child. Uh, And now we're going to get
into kind of the backstory and what happened as a
result of that find. So to return to our backstory

(17:05):
for this this family. Michael bell, a Rhode Island folklorist
and researcher and author of the book Food for the
Dead on the Trail of New England's Vampires, has studied
this New England vampire phenomenon for more than thirty years,
and in that time he's documented six dozen incidents of exhumations,
and he believes really strongly that there were many many

(17:26):
others that just haven't been discovered yet. Yes, so when
Tracy mentioned earlier that you sometimes read about uncovering a
random grave, that he thinks that they're probably way more
cemeteries that we haven't even stumbled upon yet. Right. The
earliest exhamation that he's recorded is from the late seventeen hundreds,
and the furthest away from New England that he's recorded
is happened in Minnesota. For a context, the Salem witch

(17:51):
hunts were primarily slotted in the sixteen nineties, so this
was sometime after that. Yes, so even the earliest incident
of this vampire panic was roughly a hundred years later
than the witch hunts had kind of happened and and
died off. So you know, I don't know, socially, it
filled a gap of a need for superstitious paranormal situation.

(18:11):
But scare that Bell has studied actually involved a letter
from a councilman which was printed in the Connecticut korn
And Weekly Intelligencer, and this letter actually warned the editor
and readers of the paper about a quack doctor who
was suggesting exhimation and burning of the dead to stop consumption,

(18:32):
which was believed to be done by these dead bodies,
like the consumption had been initiated by them. Most of
the research into this practice of exhuming bodies during the
vampire scare is based on handwritten records, and many grave
sites are similar to the ones in the Griswold discovery
that we just talked about, and they're unmarked and sort
of lost in time. And the genesis of the vampire

(18:55):
fear that was happening in New England in this period
really has yet to be pinpointed, but as with any
folkloric myth, it's likely that there's no single starting point.
Rather a small seed of a legend fed a lurking
and present fear of the unexplained because even though they
could diagnose consumption, they didn't know what caused it, uh
And in turn that would all add to the mythology

(19:16):
and you know, build the legend, and that would feed
more fear and so on the way these things happen.
And certainly a doctor suggesting the idea like that we
should burn these bodies because they're feeding off the living,
would allow that superstition to gain a little bit of ground.
So that incident, you know, probably added a significant ground
swell to what was already likely being talked about in communities. Right.

(19:40):
And on top of that, if you're not actually familiar
with medicine or anatomy or the way bodies decompose, it's
easy to misinterpret normal decomposation. Through this lens of cognitive
bias and a lack of medical knowledge, it's easy to
misinterpret that as some kind supernatural thing going on. So

(20:02):
bloated corpses were often described as looking like they had
just eaten, for example, or blood coming from the mouth
was held up as proof that this dead body had
been feeding on a living Yeah. When there are accounts
of these exhamations and people have kept journals are written
about them, they do they reference. It was clear this

(20:22):
must have been happening because the body was bloated, it
had just eaten, and the hair had continued to grow.
They didn't know that that happened yet as part of decomposition.
And well, it's the it's that your skin received. It
looks like your hair and your nails are growing, but
that's not what's happening. Yeah, So they were attributing this
to this dead body somehow getting you know, nutrition from

(20:44):
from uh. These people that were dying of consumption and
the Jewitt City panic and similar incidents had all really
taken place in rural, fairly isolated areas. They were often
small farming communities. There are records such as journal entries
and even newspaper write ups from cities and more metropolitan
areas that really suggests that when outsiders like would travel

(21:07):
through these small towns or small settlements, they really kind
of chalk this up as like crazy superstition, and that
these were just really overzealous, uneducated farm folk who didn't
know any better than to blame common things on the supernatural. Yeah.
And what's interesting is that in many instances, the consumption

(21:27):
that was actually killing people had really been diagnosed by
a doctor, but because people didn't really know what was
causing consumption, it was still believed that it was somehow
the dead that we're doing it. Yeah. I think a
lot of people tend to assume, uh, And it's often
not clear when you're reading some of these articles and
accounts of what happened. They think that people didn't know

(21:49):
that people were dying of a disease. They just sort
of thought suddenly people were dying, and they didn't know
what caused it. And and while they didn't know the
cause of consumption and that it was bacterial, there were doctors,
this person has consumption, they are going to die. Uh,
So there is still this uh. You know, there was
a certain amount of knowledge, but it wasn't enough. And

(22:12):
you know, it's worth considering the fact that in the
face of a disease that was incurable at the time,
it's understandable that there was likely a strong desire to
do something anything to try to remedy the situation, even
if it was the bizarre digging up bodies and burning
of corpses or parts of corpses and sometimes consuming them,

(22:34):
and it all, it all is kind of wacky and bizarre.
It seems extreme. But if you just have you can't
do anything, but you feel a need to do something
that seemed like their avenue. And because there were people who,
you know, by some combination of luck in their their constitution,
their immune system did not die, there was a lot

(22:56):
of trying to figure out, Okay, why did that person
right that that clearly there must be something we can
do because that person survive. And this is something that
you know, human beings continue to do today. People will
try all kinds of stuff when you know, told that
they have something that's not treatable by conventional you know,

(23:17):
western medicine. Yeah. Well, and it's worth noting that Mercy
Brown's father who gave into this request to exume his
family's remains, though he was not there and did think
it was whoie, he never got consumption even though three
members of his family, four members of his family died
of it. Uh and some people said it was because

(23:38):
he didn't believe that he somehow had you know, magically
created this talisman for himself of not acknowledging the spirits
and so they couldn't get him. And in some ways,
even though scientifically you would say this, you know, supports
the idea that this wasn't really a functioning, working approach
to dealing with this disease, some people were able to
spin his good health as a way to somehow prove

(24:02):
that in fact, no, no, the spiritual angle is correct.
As somehow want to do an episode on the history
of magical thinking. Yeah, but I think it would require
all of my research for all time forever, and then
the episode would be like nine minute, million hours long. Well,
it's and it's hard to find your way into, like
where you latch in to start something like that, because

(24:23):
it is that's a long and storied tradition. Yes. So,
while there were uh many, many uniting factors, and most
communities that had one of these vampire exhumations take place,
they're all rural, they're all battling disease outbreaks, the manner
in which the ritual work was done was not consistent

(24:44):
among all of these events. Yeah, some instances of vampire
exhamation involved a great deal of ritual. One practice documented
in some cases in Vermont, Connecticut, and Rhode Island involved
burning the dead person's heart, often mixed with herbs, and
inhaling the smoke as a cure for a disease. There's

(25:05):
also the eating the ashes ritual that was used in
the Mercy Brown exhumation. But there were other communities that
took a really simple approach. They would uh, merely open
the grave, flip the body face down, and then rebury it. Yeah,
the thinking being, now when this tries to get out,
it will just be going deeper into their correct like
it won't it won't understand its orientation. People think ghosts

(25:35):
are dogs smart enough to feed off the living, not
smart enough to roll over. So Vermont's exhumations and burning
rituals were much more of a public spectacle than anywhere else,
and often they took place in the town square because
it is probably because a lot of townships in the
area at the time had their cemeteries close to the

(25:57):
center of town rather than weigh out on the outskirts
as was customary and other places. So this minute would
be tricky to carry out. The whole business of addressing
this vampire problem in any sort of secret, low key way.
So instead it just became this extremely public practice. Yeah,
and most other communities you read about, it's kind of
like a group of strong wild men kind of get
together in the dead of night and they're going to

(26:18):
go do this gruesome thing to protect a town or
protect a family, and they kind of kept it on
the d l really, but in Vermont they were kind
of like party of the town square, We're gonna burn
some vampires because you know, they can't really hide it
when it's right there. Yeah, hard to dig up a
grave and plain site and still keep it quiet. And

(26:39):
of course there is um the Griswold case where the
body was exhumed and the bones were rearranged in an
effort to keep the dead from rising up to claim
the victims. And so this is a little different than
most of them more common approaches. Um uh. Two researchers,
including Nicholas Belentoni and paul As sled Zick, which I

(27:00):
hope I pronounced correctly, wrote an article on the American
Journal of Physical Anthropology about it, and they suggested the
idea that since this JB character was exhumed approximately five
years after his death. Decomposition would have been so advanced
that he probably wasn't any more than bones to work with,
and since they could not find a blood engorged heart

(27:22):
or other flesh to burn, the exhumers likely improvised this
rearrangement into the skull and crossbones style because there have
not been a lot of those found. That might be
the only one in fact, so, uh, we have all
of this knowledge of these things happening, but we don't
have a lot of evidence outside from personal accounts and

(27:45):
written word. And there have been instances where there are
suspected graves where people think if we uh could dig
up this old plot we found, we might find some
more evidence. But some communities are like, please don't do that. Um.
There are not always into the idea of just digging
up bodies in the interest of finding vampire lower. Not
everyone is as excited about exhumation as many stuff he

(28:09):
miss the hisstory class lists are so so far the Griswold,
Connecticut JB is the only instance where we actually have
a visual confirmation of this practice of exuming the dead
to deal with a vampire threat. Yeah, we have lots
of historical accounts and journals and articles and things, but
not so many in the United States actual graves. Yeah,

(28:30):
well of messed up bones and bodies. Yeah, And so
you know, the Mercy Brown incident was kind of considered
the book end by many to this bizarre panic and
outbreak because after that, as we said, it got publicized,
it got talked about. I mean, news of it traveled
to London and to Europe, and uh, it seems like
people suddenly kind of turned the mirror on this practice

(28:52):
and went oh yeah. And plus they were moving out
of these smaller communities to bigger places to find their fortunes,
and that's sort of group think superstition that can sometimes happen.
This seemed to dissipate around then. So yeah, well, in
the the state of medical knowledge was just so much
different at the time. And this is something that you
and I talked about before we recorded our recent episode

(29:13):
on Phineas Gauge that it was really hilarious in a
way to me to read these accounts from people who
were writing as though they totally knew what they were
talking about, but actually had no idea that pathogen's cause
disease like it's you will read medical documents from you know,

(29:34):
before the late eight late ninete or twentieth century, where
people just seemed to completely know what they're talking about.
But what they are talking about is not based on
the reality of medicine as we know it today. Well,
and some of it's just that they didn't have all
the the data to interpret the data they did have, right,

(29:54):
so it was easy to kind of, you know, extrapolate
things down the wrong path, right. They weren't necessarily using
the scientific method to approach questions of medicine. If this,
if these stories interest you a lot, there's an awesome
podcast called saw Bones Maximum fun Um. It is by
Sydney and Justin McElroy, and Sydney is a medical doctor

(30:17):
and she talks to her husband about just the crazy,
ridiculous things that used to happen and sometimes still do
happen in the world of medicine. And they have done
lots and lots of awesome episodes, including one on John
Harvey Killogg that actually has some information in it that
is not an hour one. So even if you the
nice interlocking yeah, even if you think you know all

(30:40):
the things about John Harvey Killogg, just give that a
listen anyway. So that's the scoop on the Vampire Ship scoop.
Do you have some listener mail to cap this episode off?
I do. I actually have two pieces. The first one
is from Sarah Kate and it's short. She says, Hello, Yeah,
probably like you. I so daily. In fact, I first
heard about the podcast during amending session. I was teaching

(31:02):
about darning, and she says, Now, I listen to the
podcast when I sew. She says, I appreciated the episode
about the invention of the sewing machine and the resulting
patent disputes. I'd like to hear a podcast about mercerized
cotton thread or viscos, which I understand to be made of,
among other things. Would pulp that's correct? Heck, nylon spandex elastic?
Now that was a great invention. It was even used

(31:23):
in corsets before they faded away. And why does elastic
lose its stretch as rubber bands do? Do they become unstretchable?
In time? Yours and the needle arts Sarah Kate and I.
She sent us a link to her blog which covers
her projects, which are very cool. She does a lot
more of sort of heirloom style sewing, yeah, which is
really really lovely. And I wanted to read this because, um,

(31:45):
while we don't have an immediate plan to talk about
those things here, uh, most of you may know and
stuff if you listen to stuff to blow your mind.
Robert is traveling, and so while he is in China,
which I know he has told their listeners he's doing.
Uh uh, I'm gonna sub in on one of their episodes,
and Julie and I've talked about that we want to
talk about textiles because nice a'sma jam yeah, and so

(32:08):
we are going to talk about some of those things.
One of the awesome things about working at a place
that has so many cool podcasts is that when we
do have someone who's on leave for some reason, well
there's all kinds of cool substitutions that people get to
play with. Yeah, some of our other editors have recorded
with Julie already, And I'm gonna talk about Velcrow a
lot because I'm really fascinated by it from a scientific

(32:31):
point of view. And our other one is from our
listener Catherine, and I'm not reading her whole email because
it's lengthy, but she talks about food, so you know,
I want to talk about it. Jesuys. Dear Holly and Tracy.
I've been listening to your podcast for a few months now,
usually wall fulfilling the less brainy aspects of my job
as an archivist at the Montana Historical Society. Uh she

(32:52):
has lots of reboxing of documents and sorting in microfiche.
I have worked in archives before. I know there are
times when your brain is not getting stimulated. It seems
like you would have to be, but not always. I
was on a hike though, when I finally got around
to listening to your podcast on ice cream over Labor
Day weekend, which may have been a poor decision considering
the heat of the day and the dearth of ice
cream atop Mountain Helena. Anyway, though it's not my area

(33:15):
in particular, the history of cooking and other quote women's
work is something of a specialization of a few of
our research center and museum staff, so I've been exposed
to some interesting tidbits about it over the past year
and a half. Ice Cream came to Montana before the
days of refrigerators. In the summertime, homesteaders would sometimes take
advantage of hail storms to provide the needed ice. Okay,

(33:36):
that's so cool, that's really say. And there's at least
one documented case of people going up into the mountains
to fetch snow to make ice cream for a Fourth
of July picnic. One of my favorite things about working
at MHS has been testing historic recipes. We had hand
cranked ice cream one afternoon in June, as well as
a pancake breakfast earlier this spring. Uh, more than a
dozen of us for Pie Day made pies from historic

(33:58):
recipes found in the Historical Societies Extensive cookbook collection. Mine
was an odd example of a non creamy banana pie
from a book printed in and of course everyone got
to sample the pies once the judges had finished their
taste tests, and then it talks about some other interesting
topics that may become a podcast for us, But first
that just sounds awesome. I would love to work in

(34:20):
a place with the Brazilian historical cookbooks. As a side
note that I know from my time in libraries, cookbooks
are one of the few books that pretty consistently gain
and appreciate in value because so if you have an
old one that's in good condition, because that's part of
the problem is that they get used and they get
food stains on them, and they are on the pages
covered in flour and grease and everything. Uh. Yeah, when

(34:44):
um my mother passed away was quite a while ago.
I was working in a library and she collected cookbooks.
And the first thing our library head said was, when
you are ready, I would like to talk to you
about your mother's cookbook collection. And so a lot of
those ended up in a library because no one was
going to use them in the family, not because they
weren't cool, but I mean, if you're trying to tackle

(35:04):
three recipes a day for the rest of your life,
you wouldn't get through them. Yeah, And that way it
kind of felt like other people could really benefit from
it so well. And suddenly I spent this past weekend
in Nashville, North Carolina, where there is a used in
rare bookshop called the Captain's Bookshelf. Now I wish I
had spent a lot more time looking. There was a
cookbook section and I kind of looked at it potentially

(35:27):
and said, you already have a joy of cooking, right, yes, okay,
And then that that was the end of my thought process.
And I'm like, man, I wish I had plundered through
that a lot. Yeah. Yeah, And it's not like every
um cookbook is going to appreciate in value, particularly now
that we have multiple printings of popular television personality. Like,
it's unlikely that your Rachel Ray book is going to

(35:48):
be really valuable in ten years, right, Not that there's
not good stuff in it, it's just not the same uh,
sort of supply and demand issues that some of the
older cookbooks that were printed in the early nineteen hundreds
have really appreciated in value. If there's a good copy
s to learn out, so just interesting cookbook nursery. If
you would like to write to us about historical things
you have cooked, or anything you've cooked, or your pets

(36:10):
or anything we've talked about, uh, you can do so
at History Podcasts at Discovery dot com. You can also
connect with us on Twitter at missed in History and
at Facebook dot com slash history class Stuff. You can
visit us on Tumblr at missed in history dot tumbler
dot com, and we are on Pinterest pinning away. If
you would like to learn a little bit more about
what we've talked about today, you can go to our website.

(36:32):
Type in the word vampire and you will get a
lot of things, including how vampires work and a quiz
to see if you might be a vampire. You can
a lot of vampire happening. Yeah, you can learn about
that and almost anything else you can think of, Halloween
season related or otherwise. At our website, which is how
stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands

(36:54):
of other topics. Because it has stuff works dot com.
M Hey, since uh these episodes that we're sharing our
past classics, we have some updated information that will supersede

(37:17):
the contact stuff you've heard before. If you want to
email us, our email address is History Podcast at house
to works dot com, and you can find us across
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at house works dot com for more on this and

(37:42):
thousands of other topics. Is it how staff works dot com.