Legends 56: Ringed In

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The weather was warm, even in December.

That was one of the many things that Kermit Tyler loved about being stationed in Hawaii.

The Air Force pilot had waited a long time to transfer to the base in Oahu.

The sun, the sand, the surf, it had all been calling his name.

And finally, he was here.

So when Tyler left the house to start his early morning shift at Fort Shafter in December, he figured that it would just be another day in paradise.

This was only his second shift at the Fort Shafter Information Center.

He was, first and foremost, a pilot, but one of the Air Force majors majors had decided that even the pilots needed to know how to read the new radar systems that told them who was coming and going from the island.

So now it was Tyler's turn to learn.

As he drove, he listened to a radio station that was playing Hawaiian music.

Tyler remembered that a friend had told him that when bombers were flying from the mainland to Hawaii, they were guided by this particular radio station.

It played the music straight through for the entirety of their journey with no breaks for commercials.

So that morning, as the music played on with no interruptions, Tyler realized that there must be a squadron of bombers on their way.

At 7.15 a.m., the Fort Shafter Information Center got a call from a radar station on the other end of the island, reporting what they called the largest blip they'd ever seen.

Remembering the Hawaiian music, Kermit Tyler nodded to himself and assumed that it was a particularly big group of American bombers coming in from California.

He radioed back, telling them not to to worry.

Less than an hour later, that blip arrived.

It turns out that it wasn't a group of American planes at all.

It was the Japanese and they had come to bomb Pearl Harbor.

Tragedy, almost by definition, usually comes out of nowhere, catching us off guard.

We rarely know what form it will take or how bad the results will be.

One thing we do know, however, is that there is nothing more dangerous than making an assumption.

I'm Aaron Mankey and this is Lore Legends.

Few people really know what they are.

Drive through the Pennsylvania countryside and there is a good chance that you'll see a lot of elaborate stars painted on the sides of barns.

They're a form of Pennsylvania Dutch folk art and they're called hex signs.

Now, these stars don't actually hex people.

They're just beautiful pieces of art from a unique American subculture.

But over the years, they've inspired a lot of suspicion.

No one knows when they were first created or who started painting them on the sides of barns.

Even their symbolism has been lost to time, leaving us to interpret them.

Some believe that the four-pointed stars represent the points on a compass, and others say that they represent the four seasons.

Similarly, the 12-pointed stars could represent the 12 disciples of Christ or the 12 tribes of Israel.

Really, it's unclear.

All that said though, for generations, they have been a cultural touchstone for the Pennsylvania Dutch communities.

Now, they weren't actually called hex signs until a journalist coined that term in the 1920s.

Originally, it's believed that these painted stars were tied to Christian symbolism.

But as tourism picked up in Pennsylvania in the 20th century, some visitors assumed for whatever reason that they had more to do with witchcraft.

Tourists thought that these stars might be protecting the barns against witches.

One travel guide called them, and I quote, demonic lightning rods.

Another associated them with poltergeists and, I quote, pretty much the whole hoodoo brood.

It's easy to see where the confusion came from.

To an outsider's eye, these painted symbols might look a little satanic.

Of course, they weren't, they were just folk art.

But nobody bothered asking the locals about them before they were branded with superstition.

The hex signs were hex-free.

Of course, that isn't to say that the Pennsylvania Dutch didn't have any supernatural protections for their barns.

They did.

They were just much less obvious.

For example, some farmers drilled a hole over their barn door where they hid a scrap of paper with a Bible verse on it.

Others buried iron under their doorways since they believed that witches couldn't cross iron.

And some magical practices extended outside the farm.

Pennsylvania Dutch folk magic was called powwowing or hexarai and it was unique to Pennsylvania, complete with unusual rituals for just about any problem you could think of.

Powwow practitioners believed that you could heal a child with whooping cough by dropping them into a grain hopper.

A birthmark could be removed by passing a dead man's hand over it.

Accidents could be prevented by wearing a wolf's right eye inside your sleeve.

Now, for the most part, it was all innocent, but sometimes powwow could turn deadly.

Usually though, it wasn't because someone was using magic to hurt someone else.

It was because someone believed that they were being targeted by a witch and they wanted to break the hex.

On July 5th of 1910, Susannah Mummy begged her husband not to go to work.

For years, Henry Mummy had worked down at the local DuPont Powder Company.

In the little hamlet of Ringtown, Pennsylvania, where the population never rose above a thousand, a position at the gunpowder mill was the best job anyone could hope for.

It was decent money, money that their family needed.

Even in a rural area with a low cost of living, Henry and Susanna Mummy, or as she would usually be called Susan, still had bills to pay.

They had to keep their little farmhouse, and they had to put food on the table for their daughter Amy and their young adopted niece, Tovilia.

Tovilia was a recent added expense.

The poor girl had suffered from spinal meningitis and it left her with long-term chronic issues.

Sources are vague about her health problems, but it's clear that she was frail and that she probably wouldn't be able to work much once she grew up.

The family was more than happy to take her in, but it still meant that they had an extra mouth to feed, which required more money.

So, no, no, Henry wasn't about to miss his shift because his wife had some kind of a crazy dream.

But Susan was insistent.

She told her husband that it wasn't a dream at all.

It was a premonition.

She just knew, deep in her gut, that if he went to work that day, he would die.

But she had no real proof, just those anxieties.

And anxiety couldn't pay the bills.

So Henry shook her off and clocked in at his job.

Later that day, the DuPont Powder Company exploded.

Susan's premonition had come true.

Henry was thrown 50 feet from the building, landing on top of an apple tree.

He died from his injuries, and Susan and her children were left to fend for themselves.

Now, normally, this would have been a time when most communities came together to provide for the grieving family.

But a huge percentage of Ringtown's population had also lost loved ones in the gunpowder mill explosion.

No one was in a place where they could take take care of the mummy family.

But more importantly, they also just didn't want to.

Susan Mummy, you see, was a difficult woman, and that's putting it lightly.

She was loyal to those she loved, but those she loved were few and far between.

For the most part, she spent her days arguing with her neighbors, picking fights over the smallest things.

She was loud, abrasive, and meddlesome, and there wasn't much love lost between her and the rest of the Ringtown community.

So, instead of comforting Susan, they blamed her.

And to be honest, she was an easy scapegoat.

Before her husband died, it seems that she had told everyone about her vision.

So when it actually came true, Ringtown's residents grew suspicious.

Now, they didn't believe that she had predicted her husband's death.

They thought that she had hexed him.

And then her hex had gotten everyone else at DuPont killed as well.

Yes, it might have been the 20th century, but it seems Ringtown was stuck in the past because the community decided that susan was a witch and based on that assumption she became the town pariah no one wanted to get too close to her fearing that they would be hexed as well some of her neighbors even went as far as to claim that she had set the evil eye on them or that she had cursed their livestock regardless everyone was happy to use her when they needed her like most women accused of witchcraft susan had an affinity for medicine and so to make ends meet after losing the family's main breadwinner susan sold her services as a healer.

But she didn't make enough money to keep her home.

In the 1920s, she was evicted from the farmhouse she had once shared with Henry and her kids.

True to form, Susan didn't make it easy for them.

After she was kicked out, she moved right back in.

And so in an effort to get her to stay away, the new owners took all of the furniture and then burned the house to the ground.

But Susan didn't let that stop her.

She went back to the site of the now-destroyed house and right there, on top of the ashes, she erected a tent.

When police raided her ramshackle shelter, they found multiple shotguns and an axe.

Apparently, Susan did not come to play and she didn't get to stay either.

The police smashed her makeshift home with the same axe they found inside and then sent her packing.

Susan eventually moved into a new cottage and took in boarders to help cover her expenses.

In 1934, a boarder named Jacob Rice was living with Susan and her adopted daughter, Tovilia.

While he was staying with them, Jacob injured his foot and Susan offered to help him through the healing process.

On the night of March 17th, Susan and Tovilia were in the cottage kitchen helping Jacob replace the bandages on his foot when a blast ripped through the walls.

At that exact same time, a gust of wind swept through the open kitchen window, extinguishing the lamps and plunging the entire room into darkness.

And that's when a second crack rang out, and now they could tell what the sound was: it was gunfire.

Jacob called out, but he heard no response from anyone else, only the quiet, panicked sounds of Tovilia whimpering in the dark.

Limping across the room, he fetched a lamp and lit it, only to illuminate a horrific scene.

Tovilia was shell-shocked, but safe.

Susan, however, was dead.

The witch of Ringtown had been murdered in cold blood.

Anyone in Ringtown could have killed Susan.

After all, everyone had assumed that she was a witch, and there are a lot of possible motivations out there to murder a handmaiden of the devil.

Luckily, the police didn't actually have to search for long.

They were quickly tipped off with promising evidence.

On the night that she had died, a car had been blocking the road only half a mile from her cottage.

A group of young people on their way to a local dance actually had to move it out of the way so that their own car could pass by.

They told the police that it had been a Ford sedan and even gave them a partial license plate number.

With that information, the police were able to track the car down and identify its owner.

The sedan belonged to a 24-year-old local man named Albert Shinsky, who, as it turned out, was very easy to find.

Shinsky hadn't gone into hiding, you see.

When police came to question him on March 31st of 1934, he answered the door no problem, and within a matter of minutes, he confessed to killing Susan.

He didn't have anything to fear.

He knew that he had just been acting in self-defense.

You see, Albert Shinsky believed that Susan, as he put it, had me hexed.

He said that when he was a teenager, he and his family lived next door to Susan.

At one point, there was some kind of dispute over their cows.

Either Susan had blamed him for letting her cows escape or for letting some of his family's cows into her field.

Either way, she was livid.

According to Shinsky, Susan had declared, I'll get you for this.

He also claimed that, and I quote, she caught me with her eyes.

It felt as though someone had me by the throat.

I ran around and around trying to shake off that grip.

I couldn't do it.

And from that moment on, she had put her evil powers over him, and they had ruined his entire life.

Because of the hex, Shinsky couldn't sleep.

He was weak and unable to do hard labor.

He'd been unable to get married.

And things got even worse after Susan allegedly sent down a black cat from the skies.

Shinsky claimed that this feline was gigantic, with bright green eyes and a face that somehow looked like Susan's.

The cat visited him several nights a month for years on end, attacking and clawing at him.

All of his wounds would disappear by the morning, but his memories of how he had gotten them remained vivid.

Shinsky did everything he could to break the hex and end his torment.

He tried to bleed himself.

He starved himself.

He asked priests to pray for him.

He even held handstands as long as he possibly could, hoping that standing upside down would annoy the evil spirit and it would leave his body alone.

But nothing worked until he finally went to a powwow doctor, which was the name for a traditional Pennsylvania Dutch folk healer.

The powwow doctor gave him some small solutions, like sleeping with a board under his mattress and chanting God's name to drive away the black cat.

But he warned Shinsuke that the only way to truly break the hex was to kill Susan.

It took Shinsky years to work up the courage, but finally he claimed that he was visited by an angel who simply told him, kill her.

And that was all he needed to send him over the edge.

He began to plan the murder.

He borrowed a gun from a friend, crafted a set of homemade bullets, and then set out to kill the witch of Ringtown Valley.

He didn't regret what he'd done.

In fact, according to Shinsky, he'd had his first good night of sleep in seven years after his arrest.

Speaking with one newspaper, he declared, now I can face anything.

Thank God, I am a man again.

It's clear now that if Shinsky wasn't lying about his experiences, he was a man in need of professional medical assistance.

But that wouldn't have made a good story for the media.

No, instead, the newspapers focused on mocking the Pennsylvania Dutch.

They sensationalized the local belief in witchcraft, highlighting hex signs on the barns and claiming that Shinsky's homemade bullets could drive away the devil.

Then, things took a very prejudiced turn, with most newspapers blaming German immigrants for bringing superstition about witches into America.

As you would imagine, the story of Susan Mummy's murder blew up all across the country.

But despite the biased reporting, Albert Shinsky wasn't just written off as an uneducated backwater murderer.

No, instead, he was carefully examined by experts and within months he was declared mentally unfit to stand trial.

Instead of going to court, he was sent to the Fairview Criminal Insane Hospital.

The doctors there diagnosed him with what they called dementia praecox, which caused someone to have hallucinations and suffer through paranoid delusions.

Today, we know it better as schizophrenia.

Shinsky was told that he would have to stay in Fairview until his doctors deemed him safe enough to stand trial.

But as the years passed by, that day never came.

Both in 1947 and in 1962, Albert petitioned to be released, but he was denied both times by his doctors.

And so, Albert stayed there year after year, with almost no hope of ever getting out.

41 years after Albert killed Susan, he was moved.

The transfer landed him at the Wernersville Mental Hospital, but the doctors there completely disagreed with the assessment of the Fairview doctors.

Within a matter of weeks, they said that Albert Shinsky was mentally fit for trial.

According to one doctor, he still believed in the existence of witches, but he was completely healthy otherwise, and he had no other outlandish beliefs or behaviors.

Shinsky was eager to be let out, too, saying, I was a stupid, foolish, superstitious young man when I did the murder, but I do think I've been punished enough.

In 1976, Shinsky was finally put on trial for Susan Mummy's murder.

Well, kind of.

The trial actually ended before it could really begin because none of the witnesses were still alive.

So the case was just dismissed.

Shinsky was released to live with a family member, and he never had his day in court.

He died in 1983 as a free man, although some speculate that his last years weren't 100% peaceful.

You see, shortly after he was released in 1976, the cottage where Susan had been killed was mysteriously burned to ashes.

Local authorities believe the cause to be arson.

The perpetrator, however, was never caught.

And naturally, some people can't help but wonder if Shinsky took one final trip to the home of the witch of Ringtown and burned her memory to the ground.

I hope today's dive into a weird corner of American legend has left you with some new ideas about witchcraft.

Most of us tend to dress witch trial stories up in European details or set them within the English countryside.

The Witch of Ringtown, though, shows just how far those fears and prejudices manage to travel.

But that wasn't the only community in Pennsylvania to deal with a panic of that type.

In fact, we've put together one last story from another town entirely, and I think you're going to love it.

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The Salem witch trials might be the poster child, but they're actually late to the game.

By the late 17th century, witch hunts were a fad that had mostly come and gone.

The Western world was more enlightened and fewer people were blaming what they didn't understand on the devil.

That's actually one of the reasons that Salem captured the world's attention.

Mass executions for witchcraft just weren't done anymore.

But nearly 200 years after those witch trials in Salem, it would seem that some pockets of America still didn't get the memo because in the late 19th century, Stony Creek Valley, Pennsylvania was still being called a witch-belief-ridden community by contemporary newspapers.

And in 1877, they had a little witch problem.

It all started when a young local girl named Emma Kildie fell ill, and she wasn't dealing with your average head cold.

Apparently, her body was in pain.

She was making, and I quote, noises and faces like a cat and a dog.

And most unusually of all, she was speaking in Pennsylvania Dutch, a language that she did not know.

Her father, William, was beside himself with worry.

He hired doctor after doctor, but none of them could help his daughter.

Finally, he went to an astrologer who told him that Emma had been bewitched.

And the family accepted this diagnosis immediately.

For them, it was the only thing that made sense.

And so they transitioned their focus from healing Emma to finding the witch.

Emma's half-sister went to a witch doctor for advice.

He told her to look into a bucket of water.

The reflection would show the witch who was responsible for laying the curse.

When she looked into that water, she saw the old withered face of their neighbor, Mrs.

Boyer.

The family decided not to confront Mrs.

Boyer, presumably to avoid getting bewitched themselves.

Instead, William Kildie went to another witch doctor named Armstrong McLean, and he told William that he had broken the spell and that Emma would be healed by sunset.

And he was right.

When William returned home that night, Emma was completely cured.

And Emma stayed healthy for another two years.

But then in 1879, she fell ill again.

William went to Armstrong McCain for a second bit of guidance, and once again, the witch doctor laid the blame on Mrs.

Boyer for bewitching Emma.

This time though, he gave Emma some medicine.

He then took took out a bundle of papers containing herbs, roots, and white powder.

He filled a bottle with water, adding the herbs and powder.

After that ritual was done, he asked the kill days for a hammer.

He took the hammer outside for a while, and then when he returned, he announced, now I will kill the witch.

He lightly tapped Emma on the head with the hammer, and after that, she was healed.

This time, Emma's cure lasted until January of 1880.

That was the month that she traveled to to a wedding with her family, a journey that took her right past Mrs.

Boyer's house.

Now look, old Mrs.

Boyer may truly have been a deeply unpleasant woman, but my money is on the fact that by this point, she had probably heard that the Kildies were calling her a witch behind her back.

According to the Kildie family, a furious Mrs.

Boyer stormed into the middle of the road and began yelling at Emma in Pennsylvania Dutch.

Emma fell ill again the very next day, and this time the witch doctor said that if the medicine didn't keep her safe, then then it would never work again.

After Emma's third bewitchment diagnosis, the Stony Creek Valley community shunned the Boyer family.

In their eyes, the proof was undeniable.

Mrs.

Boyer had to be a witch.

But the Boyer family disagreed, and so they filed a lawsuit against the witch doctor Armstrong McCain for slander.

On March 30th of 1880, a hearing was held for the case.

And to be honest, this was probably the most exciting thing to have happened in Stony Creek Valley for years.

So, naturally, roads were full of spectators, all of whom had come to watch the proceedings, and almost all of whom believed in witches.

When William Kildy took the stand, he told the judges all about their struggles with breaking Emma's curse.

Then he declared that an apparition of Mrs.

Boyer had appeared on Emma's bed the night before the trial.

According to him, she declared, I have her now and I will kill her.

The judge, though, was unimpressed with William's story.

He asked if the man really could, and I quote, be deluded with such stuff.

William Kildy replied, Squire, I firmly believe that Mrs.

Boyer is a witch, that she bewitched my daughter, and I have spent nearly all my means in the past three years to have her cured.

The judge moved on to questioning McCain.

The witch doctor told him about everything he had done to cure Emma, and the judge was just as unmoved by his logic as he had been by William's.

He ordered McCain to stand trial for slander.

After the hearing, Emma claimed to still be tormented by Mrs.

Boyer, and so in an effort to protect her, the Kildie family packed up and moved away from Stony Creek Valley before the trial could begin.

The charges against McCain were dropped, and as far as we know, that was the end of the matter.

No one knows where the Kildies went, or if Emma's torment continued after they moved away.

What we do know is that, no matter what was truly wrong with Emma, it wasn't Mrs.

Boyer's fault.

But knowing how superstitious Stony Creek Valley was, it's unlikely that many people there would agree.

And once again, a Pennsylvania woman's life was ruined because everyone assumed she was a witch.

This episode of Lore Legends was produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with writing by Alex Robinson and research by Cassandra de Alma.

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