A potpourri of peculiar tales culled from a favorite 19th-century volume. This episode features some outstanding British eccentrics, an extraordinary case of delusional morbidity, lethal religious fanaticism, graveyard shenanigans, and more. Plus, more black-humored poetry from Harry Graham in “Karswell’s Corner”
Our survey of villainous Victorian women examines six individuals associated with some of the most ghastly crimes of the era, many directed against children (and for this reason possibly a bit of a rough listen for some.)
Five of these criminals inspired murder ballads, or more specifically “execution ballads,” single-sheet broadsheets sold at the time of the trials or executions.
The sixth woman, Mary Ann Cotton, a poisoner from the north of England, also inspired verses, in this case, however, a schoolyard rope-skipping chant of the type memorializing Lizzie Borden. (We begin the show with a version the Borden rhyme from 1956 episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents remixed by Bob’s Vids.)
Mary Ann Cotton
Cotton, Britain’s first female serial killer, was executed in 1873 for the murder of her stepson, the last of 13 offspring whose lives she’d taken, that along with three of her four husbands, who were generously insured to ensure the poisoner would profit from her evil.
Like Cotton, our next murderer also preferred arsenic as her lethal weapon. The American, Lydia Sherman, throughout the 1860s and early ’70s poisoned eight children as well as three husbands in New York and Connecticut. Dubbed “the modern Lucretia Borgia” by the press, Sherman was also the subject of an 1873 book, The Poison Fiend: The Most Startling and Sensational Series of Crimes Ever Committed in this Country. Unlike Cotton, however, Sherman escaped the gallows, sentenced instead to end her life in prison. We begin her segment with a snippet of the broadside “Ballad of Lydia Sherman” by the Mockingbirds.
We next look at Emma Pitt, a schoolteacher in the British village of Hampreston in Dorset, who murdered a child in 1869. While only taking the life of a single victim, her crime was regarded as particularly heinous as that victim was her own newborn baby, not only killed but mutilated by its mother.
Kate Webster
Our next murderess, the Irish servant Kate Webster was found guilty of killing her mistress Julia Thomas in 1879. While she also committed but a single homicide, she’s remembered for the particularly grisly details shared in her trial regarding her disposition of Thomas’ body. Webster’s trial was such a sensation that Gustav, Crown Prince of Sweden, traveled to Britain for the trial, and Madame Tussaud displayed her figure in the Chamber of Horrors for nearly six decades.
The unspeakable deeds of our next criminal are recorded in the 1843 ballad, “Mary Arnold, the Female Monster.” The less said here about this abomination the better as it may be the most horrific account related in the history of our show.
Our final segment opens with a snippet from another ballad, “Mrs. Dyer the Baby Farmer,” as sung by Eliza Carthy. In 1896 Amelia Dyer was executed in London for the murder of a single child, though many more deaths were suspected during her 17 years working as a “baby farmer.”
Dyer is the most notorious example of this shady practice by which mothers arranged adoption of illegitimate or unwanted children with mercenary caregivers. The sum paid, being was a relatively low fee affordable to lower class women, was therefore not realistically expected to sustain the child for long. For this reason, infants thus abandoned, tended to be poorly fed, or outright starved, quieted with gin, or even killed, the last being the case made against Amelia Dyer.
We close with a snippet of the ballad heard earlier, in this case sung by Derek Lamb.
A short and somewhat extra episode for the Halloween season, a presentation of the 1910 horror story by Ambrose Bierce, “A Vine on a House.” Also, some show updates.
We’ll have a full episode, “Who Put the Hell in Helloween?” closer to the end of the month.
“The Girl with No Hands” is the name of a a folk-tale motif shared by a number of gruesome fairy stories in which the the amputation of the heroine’s hands allows her to escape death, the Devil, or a repugnant suitor.
(NOTE: For details on the 2022 Bone and Sickle shirts mentioned in the show, please visit boneandsickle.com, or go directly to our Etsy shop.)
We begin our show with a religious legend differing in narrative details but sharing the amputation theme. It’s a medieval story told in Eastern Orthodox lands of the terrible cost of bad manners at a funeral, specifically that of the Virgin Mary. As a further preliminary to our stories, we also offer a quick rundown on the Aarne–Thompson–Uther system of folk-tale classification, in which “The Girl with No Hands” is identified as ATU 706.
The oldest written example of this motif is the Italian story “Biancabella,” from Le piacevoli notti (“The Pleasant Nights”), a book published in two volumes between 1550 and 1553. The author, Giovanni Francesco Straparola, appears to have modeled his collection on Boccaccio’s Decameron as it uses a similar frame-story, Straparola’s involving characters pleasantly passing their nights (hence the title) in the telling of tales. Among the stories Straparola included, is the first version of “Puss in Boots.”
Straparola ‘s “The Pleasant Nights”
I won’t spoil listeners’ pleasure in hearing Mrs. Karswell read for you the original text but will divulge that its hand-losing heroine Biancabella shares a birth kinship with a serpentine fairy; also, that her hands are sacrificed in an effort to convince her wicked stepmother that her orders to execute her step-daughter have been carried out, and that guilty parties endure in the end a fiery foretaste of hell.
Our second story is “Penta the Handless” from Il Pentamerone (or “The Tale of Tales”) was written about a century later, in 1634, by the Italian poet Giambattista Basile. This collection of stories also makes use of the framing device, having the stories told by a group of courtiers attempting to cheer a melancholy princess. Among the 50 stories included are the first written versions of Cinderella, Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty, and Hansel and Gretel.
In this story, Penta’s mutilation is self-inflicted as a means of repelling the incestuous advances of her brother. Her royal sibling has an exotic means of expelling her from the kingdom, namely, sealing her in a tarred chest and casting her into the sea (a motif that dates back to the plays of Euripides or even the story of the infant Moses).
Basile’s Il Pentamerone
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm provide a relatively late example of this narrative, one however that has provided the ATU #706 with a name:,”The Girl with No Hands.” The story is ncluded in the Grimm’s first 1812 edition of Kinder- und Hausmärchen, i.e., “Grimm’s Fairy Tales.” Our Grimm segment, by the way, begins with a clip from the trailer for the 1962 film The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm.
As an oral folk-tale, this German version dispenses with some of the detailed intrigues that mark its two Italian antecedents. Rather than a wicked in-law or brother, it’s the Devil, who tricks a down-on-his-luck miller into doing the gruesome deed. As is frequent in German stories collected by the Grimms, a magical forest-dwelling man also plays a role.
We also briefly discuss a few versions of the story published after Jacob & Wilhelm’s version — other German, Italian, and Hungarian tales which place blame for the amputation not on the Devil but on wicked family members. A gruesome detail included in a few of these mirrors a similarly faux-cannibalistic scene from the Grimms’ original “Snow White.”
We return to Russian for our final story, “The Armless Maiden,” one of the nearly 600 folk tales or skazki contained in the multi-volume Russian Fairy Tales collection compiled by state ethnographer Alexander Afanasyev between 1855 and 1863.
The heroine here is an orphan happily living with her brother until the day her brother takes a bride, as she turns out to be a witch, who is less than happy sharing the household with another female — and has a particularly brutal way of showing it. A strange example of sort Lamarckian evolutionary magic marks this one, with the armless maiden giving birth to a child with silver arms. A particularly gruesome manner of dispatching the sorceress is also a highlight.
We end the show with a Russian musical snippet from an electronic band from Moscow, a duo making music since 2013, under the name IC3PEAK. The song in question rather appropriately begins with the line “I come from a Russian Horror Fairy Tale” and further endears itself with the delightful Baba-Yaga-esque animation of its music video.
Whether freshly removed or strangely preserved after death, the dead lover’s heart occasionally has continued to be embraced as a repository of intensely shared romantic experience. This Valentine’s Day episode explores two different narratives touching on that theme: a historical tale from the 19th-century literary culture of England and a collection of related medieval legends, literature, and song.
The first half of our episode looks at the strange circumstance surrounding the death, in 1822, of Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the postmortem keepsake inherited by his wife Mary Shelley.
Louis Fournier’s “The Funeral of Shelley,” 1889.
The second half examines two gruesome narratives taken from the 14th century, both from Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron, namely that of the ill-fated lovers Ghismonda & Guiscardo (First Story, Day Four) and of the tragic romantic exploits of Guilhem de Cabestaing (Ninth story, Day Four). Incidentally, our Valentine’s Day show from last year also explores another gruesome tale from The Decameron.
De Cabestaing was an actual historical figure, a Catalan ministrel, whose fictional vida (biography) was often attached to collections of his ballads and served as Boccaccio’s inspiration.
We also look at the Ley of ’Ignaure, a chivalric romance written by the Burgundian French author, Renaud de Beaujeu, probably around the year 1200. This was likely the source of Cabestaing’s vida, Boccaccio’s stories, and the English-Scottish ballad, “Lady Diamond,” from which we also hear a snippet.
“Sigismunda Mourning over the Heart of Guiscardo 1759 William Hogarth
In keeping with the old tradition of whiling away the nights of Christmas telling ghost stories, we bring you a tale published in 1912 by E.F. Benson. Read by Mrs. Karswell, complete with sound FX and music as always.
Transylvania’s vampire lore inspired the setting of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, if not the character of the Count, and encompasses not only undead monsters, but living beings akin to witches. (The show is introduced with an audio snippet from Maria Tănase, premiere interpreter of Romanian folk song.)
Mrs. Karswell begins the show, reading a passage Stoker wrote for Jonathan’s Harker’s Transylvania travel journal kand its source in an 1855 essay by Emily Gerard, “Transylvania Superstitions.” Originally from Scotland, Gerard developing an interest in the local folklore while living abroad and expand her essay in the 1888 book, The Land Beyond the Forest. She seems to have derived a fair amount of her vampire lore from a German scholar, Wilhelm von Schmidt, who in 1865 article contributed an article on the subject to the Austrian Review.
Illustration from “The Land Beyond the Forest”
While much of Gerard and von Schmidt’s information seems well sourced, the nomenclature used for vampires is incorrect. The word “nosferatu” put forward by the two folklorists and repeated by Stoker in his novel as the common Transylvanian word for “vampire” is not actually a Romanian word — but we sort out the confusion.
In Romanian, there are two words for vampiric beings, which Gerard subsumed under “nosferatu.” They are moroi and strigoi (male forms, plural moroii, strigoii). Strigoi seems to be a more expansive category and is discussed more in the folklore, but both share many traits including behaviors, preventatives, and modes of destruction. Moroii and strigoii tend to blur together along with two other entities, vârcolaci, and pricolici, which might be closer to our concept of the werewolf (something for a later show).
Before diving into the details on these creatures, I provide a note on two sources used for the episode, chose as they seem better grounded than Gerard’s in Romanian language and culture. The first is by Agnes Murgoci, a British zoologist, whose marriage brought her to Romania and into contact with Tudor Pamfile, a well known native-born folklorist, whose tales of vampires Murgoci translates in the source article: “The Vampire in Roumania,” published in the journal Folklore in 1926. The other source is a Romanian language book from 1907: Folk Medicine, by Gr. Grigoriu-Rigo, in which I found a large and unexpected trove of regional vampire lore.
Illustration from “The Land Beyond the Forest”
While living an evil life makes one more likely to become a strigoi or moroi, through no fault of their own, an individual who does not receive proper burial rites, will live on to destroy those who failed to fulfill their funereal duties — namely, his family and relations. We have a look at some of the old burial custom, which includes and audio snippet of bocet, a form of traditional lamentation offered at funerals.
We then dig into the moroi and traits its shares with the strigoi: the tendency to attack family members, similar preventatives and modes of destruction as well as shared methods detection of thevampire in its grave.
The strigoi in some ways is closer to the pop-culture vampire — unlike the moroi, it’s sometime explicitly said to drink blood, and garlic is a primary prophylactic. Alongside its practice of destroying loved ones, we hear of some peculiar incidents in which the strigoi also engages with its family in more neutral or even helpful (if unwanted) ways.
We then have a look at livingstrigoii, that is, strigoii fated to become undead after burial but in life exhibiting supernatural abilities and evil inclinations. In many cases, these beings bear comparisons to witches. Possessing the evil eye and the ability to leave the sleeping body in another form (usually a small animal) are examples of this.
Some methods of preventing a living strigoi from rising from its grave are discussed as well as means of destroying these creatures. Techniques employed against the moroi, while simlar occasionally include additional techniques, such as application of tar or quicklime to the body. Priests’ blessings and spells by benevolent wise women can also be employed (and we hear an audio example of the latter).
The remainder of our show consists of vampire folk tales collected by Tudor Pamfile as provided via Murgoci’s translations. The first pair of stories illustrate the resemblance between living strigoii and witches. These are followed by tales of male strigoii pursuing women vaguely prefiguring the pop-culture vampire Stoker birthed.
Customs of November 29, the “Night of the Strigoi” in Romania, are then described along with its folkloric significance and relationship to St. Andrew, followed by a clip from the 2009 British comedy, Strigoi.
Though no longer common in Transylvania, in rural regions toward Romania’s Bulgarian border, belief in vampires is still part of life. We hear a bit of a Romanian news segment on a poltergeist-like vampire plaguing the largely Romani village of Sohatu followed by a 2004 case from the village Celaru, which made international news when the body of an alleged vampire was disinterred and its heart burned.
The musical closer to the show is by the horror host Zacherley.
A break from the usual themes for the Halloween season: the second part of our survey of 40 years of Horror hosts, this time the hosts of the 1960s and a couple years of the ’70s.
Included in this installment: Morgus the Magnificent, Sammy Terry, Chilly Billy Cardille, Ghoulardi, The Vegas Vampire, The Cool Ghoul, Svengoolie, and Sir Cecil Creape.
Also: Psychic Bee fortune-telling with Mrs. Karswell
Cases of madness and even murder were associated with Hexerei, a form of witchcraft brought to Pennsylvania by German immigrants. Following up on our previous examination of the tradition of Braucherei or Pow-Wow as practiced in 18th and 19th century Pennsylvania, our current episode eplores some more disturbing cases of witchcraft beliefs surviving into the 1920s and ’30s.
By the 1890s, any public notice taken of Braucherei tended to be negative. Journalists were quick with comparisons to the Salem witchcraft mania and tended to focus on cases in which witchcraft belief led to madness. We hear an example of this from an 1891 Pittsburgh Dispatch article describing two women driven to paranoia in the hills of Earl and Douglass townships. From the Public Weekly Opinion of Chambersburg, PA, we hear bits of an 1894 story describing the extreme (and destructive) measures taken by a George Kellar to rid his property of witches.
The first of the witchcraft-related homicides we examine comes from a March 1922 edition of the York Daily Record. It’s the case Sallie Heagy, whose belief in witchcraft and a night-hag like entity known in Pennsylvania as “Trotterhead,” led to her shooting her husband while he slept.
We then move on to the most famous witchcraft murder in Pennsylvania, namely that of a part-time Braucher and potato farmer, Nelson Rehmeyer, who met his end in York County in 1928. Mrs. Karswell opens this segment reading a description of the discovery of the decedent’s body taken from a Nov. 30 edition of the Hanover Evening Sun.
The murder was committed by a group of men organized by John Blymire, a third generation Braucher or Powwower, who believed himself to have been cursed by Rehmeyer. We hear a bit of his troubled history (which included being committed to a psychiatric hospital from which he escaped) and of his accomplices, including John Curry, a younger man whom Blymire took on as a sort of magical apprentice and Wilbert Hess, whose troubles with his wife and farm, according to Blymire’s increasingly paranoic beliefs, were also tied to a curse by Rehmeyer. We also hear of the involvement of the Braucherin Nellie Noll, sometimes called the “River Witch of Marietta,” from whom Blymire sought help in identifying Rehmeyer as the one responsible for the curse laid upon him. The commission of the crime itself is described in our show via the court testimony given by Wilbert Hess.
Rehmeyer’s House in 1928
The media circus generated by a witchcraft-related murder in 20th-century Pennsylvania resulted in the press becoming obsessed with investigating any possible links to Braucherei in any Pennsylvania crime they reported on. We hear several examples of highly speculative connections made including that of the twenty-one-year-old woman Verna Delp, whose death by poison was erroneously connected to concoctions given her by a Braucher in 1928. A similar connection is examined in the 1930 case of Mrs. Harry McDonald, who was found burned to death in her home, as well as the case of Norman Bechtel, whose body was discovered in 1932 in a mutilated state, bearing injuries, the press presumptively identified as “hex marks.”
Only 6 years after the Rehmeyer case, however, another murder with an undeniable connection to withcraft belief occurred in the vicinity of Pottsville (the same region as that of our Hex Cat case in Episode 69). This was the murder on March 17, 1934 of Susan Mummey by Albert Shinsky. Mummey was a local Braucherin, known by locals as “Old Susie,” or sometimes “The Witch of Ringtown Valley,” who had a cantankerous reputation with her neighbors. At the age of 17, Shinksy experienced one such unpleasant encounter, which he came to regard as the origin of a seven-year curse placed upon him by Mummey — one that could only be resolved ultimately by slaying the witch with a magic bullet. We’ll leave the lurid details of this case for you to experience as you listen, but suffice it to say, the region still seems to have had problems with Hex Cats in 1934.
From The Philadelphia Inquirer, 24 Mar 1934
Our show closes with a look at the Rehmeyer case explored in different media. A highly fictionalized version of the story was produced in 1987 under the name Apprentice to Murder, this one featuring Donald Sutherland as a notably more bookish John Blymire type. There’s also a good 2015 documentary, Hex Hollow, which features interviews with Blymire and Rehmeyer’s descendants. Strangest of all is the manner in which this story seems to have influenced the musical psychedelia of the York County band Lenny Lionstar and The Hillbillies of The Universe. We close with a snippet of their work.
The mythology of bees has been tied for centuries to notions of the otherworld and death. In this episode we trace some of that folklore along with examining some highly peculiar uses of honey.
Continuing on (in a sense) from our Medusa episode, there follows a good deal of Greek mythology, thanks to the significant role these creatures played in that culture’s imagination, beginning with the bee-nymphs or honey-nymphs who served as nurses to the infant Zeus. There are a number of triads of female bee creatures in ancient Greek literature, which may or may not be the same. Along with Zeus’ nurses, these include the Thriae, who serve as oracles, and creatures simply dubbed “The Bee Maidens” described in a Homeric “Hymn to Hermes” (who also serve as seers.) Priestesses of Artemis and Demeter were also dubbed”bee,” and some have proposed a connection between the Delphic oracle and bees or honey, as is discussed.
Possible representation of the Thriai, Rhodes, 7th century BC.d
A brief musical interlude follows this: “The Bee Song” by British comedian Arthur Askey.
Our next topic seems to be most prominent in ancient Greek thought but was found elsewhere and persisted into the Middle Ages, namely, the belief that bees were spontaneously generated from the carcasses of oxen. This superstition, known as “bugonia” (from the Greek words for “ox” and “spawn”) is discussed in passages we hear from Virgil’s volume on agricultural lore, Georgica, and from a similar 10th century book of Byzantine creation, Geoponika. We also hear an example from the Old Testament and learn a a related and unseemly lesson about a honey-like product found in many British households. And there’s a poem by Kipling, “The Flies and the Bees” from which Mrs. Karswell reads a relevant excerpt.
Human corpses (if they happen to be a priestess of Demeter) can also generate bees, according to a passage from Virgil’s Aeneid, which we hear. And there is a story of a skull filled with honeycomb from Herodotus’ Persian Wars, one somehow similar to a report from an 1832 edition of the Belfast News Letter, which is gratuitously included merely for the grotesque image it presents.
Next we look at the ancient practice of preserving human bodies in honey. The case of Alexander the Great is described along with a number of examples from Sparta (including a honey-preserved head, which advised King Cleomenes I. And there’s a particularly repulsive story of Mariamne, the wife of King Herod, who was thus preserved.
We then examine more wholesome stories of bees — their exemplary reputation for cooperation and industry, which served many writers as a model for human society. Also wholesome are a few inlcuded Christian legends involving bees. We hear of 5th century French prelate St. Medard, whose bees punished the thief attempting to steal a hive from the saint’s apiary, and of the 6th-century Irish saint St. Gobnait, who commanded an army of bees against hostile forces threatening her community. Also included are some pious legends of architecturally ingenious bees related in Charles Butler’s The Feminine Monarchie from 1632.
The Feminine Monarchie by Charles Butler
Next, the “telling of the bees” is discussed, that is, a custom whereby those who kept hives would announce the death of a family members to their bees so they might participate symbolically in the mourning process. Also included are a number of newspaper stories of bees that seemed more than eager to participate in funerals.
We wrap up with a look at “mad honey,” a psychoactive type of honey, the effects of which are produced by a compounds called grayanotoxin found in certain plants (the rhododendron, azalea and oleander) from which bees have gathered nectar. Caveat emptor!
