Lore 271: Chill Seekers

This is the story of the one.

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As an Arctic explorer and a man of science, it's no surprise that Elisha Kent Kane was a skeptic.

But when a famous duo of teen spiritualists came through his town in the mid-1800s, he couldn't help but catch a seance to see what all the fuss was about.

The Fox sisters were their names, and when Kane laid eyes on the older sister Maggie, it was love at first sight.

As soon as he got a chance, he passed Maggie a note.

It read, Have you ever been in love?

Her cheeky response simply said, Ask the spirits.

Kane began visiting Maggie every day.

Sure, he had an Arctic journey to plan for, but love came first.

He took her for carriage rides and recited Longfellow to her.

He, and most notably his wealthy family in Philadelphia, still viewed Maggie's ghostly profession to be, and I quote, profane heresy.

Yet, despite their differences, the couple's love only grew, and they conducted their romance in secret.

According to Maggie, they later married in secret as well.

Now, in love though he was, Kane still had an Arctic expedition to embark on, and so shortly after marrying, he was forced to leave his new bride behind.

The journey was honestly awful.

Two people died.

The ship became trapped in the ice, and the crew was forced to abandon it and escape on foot.

But through it all, Kane held his prized possession close, a portrait of his darling Maggie.

It's almost like Romeo and Juliet, two worlds colliding, science versus seance, if you will, with one couple caught between.

And just like Romeo and Juliet, the story does not have a happy ending.

While Kane did survive the expedition, he picked up so many diseases on his travels that he passed away only two years later.

And here's the real tragedy of it all.

Although Maggie had spent her career convincing mourners that they could talk to their dead loved ones, in truth, it was all an act.

The Fox sisters had been frauds the whole time, which meant that despite all the comfort she had provided for others, she was unable to take comfort herself.

Her husband was truly gone.

It's quite the coincidence that the American spiritualist movement and the age of exploration lined up just so, two completely opposing ideas sharing a single sliver of time.

And let me tell you, the crossover between the two doesn't stop with Maggie and Elisha.

Far from it.

And trust me, it all gets far, far stranger.

I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore.

It was the summer of 1895, and England was sweltering.

It was one of the hottest on record, in fact, and in an age before air conditioning and soft-serve ice cream machines, everyone was dreaming of the cold, of snowball fights and Christmas markets, of boarding a ship and escaping to the icy Antarctic.

And one group of men, well, they did a whole lot more than dream.

You see, that same summer also marked the meeting of the 6th International Geographic Congress, right there in the city of London.

And on August 3rd, the meeting of the minds resolved that, and I quote, the exploration of the Antarctic regions is the greatest piece of geographical exploration still to be undertaken.

Antarctic exploration, the Congress announced, would benefit every branch of science.

So vitally, in fact, that the men urge scientific societies all across the world to suit up, gather a crew of explorers, and set sail for the frigid southern continent.

That was that.

Legions of explorers took up the call, all eager for a taste of fame, fortune, and eternal glory.

The heroic age of Antarctic exploration had officially begun.

Now, it's thought that the first humans to lay eyes on Antarctica were 7th century Maori explorers, but the first Europeans didn't see the continent until the 1820s, and even then, it's likely that no one had ever set foot on the South Pole.

So naturally, each of these new explorers was determined to be the very first.

The race to the South Pole was on.

All told, there were tons of small expeditions headed by countless hopeful voyagers.

But at the end of the day, three characters stood out above the rest.

Norway's Roald Amundsen, Ireland's Ernest Shackleton, and British explorer Robert Falcon Scott.

These were the major players, the heroes that gave the heroic age its name.

And these fellas were not messing around.

There were roughly, oh, a billion ways to die on these little holidays.

Malnutrition, especially scurvy, was a leading threat.

Or you could fall into a crevasse or get frostbitten, which could later turn to gangrene.

Then, of course, there was the risk of death by infection, pneumonia, or tuberculosis, not to mention just straight-up freezing to death.

To avoid these fates, explorers had to have the right gear.

Medical kits were essential, containing everything from aspirin to cocaine, which was applied to the eye in case of snow blindness.

For warmth, the men would wrap up in animal skins, a technique learned from Inuit culture, along with wool sweaters and Burberry jackets.

And then the wooden ships had to have hulls that were strong enough to fight through the sea ice.

But even so, becoming trapped in that ice was a constant threat.

Once the ship had traveled as far as it could, the team would set off over the ice on foot, you know, just casually walking into the desolate abyss, no big deal.

The lucky ones had sleds pulled by sled dogs or ponies, who would sometimes wear adorable little pony snowshoes for what it's worth.

And hey, the dogs and ponies could always serve as a quick snack in a pinch.

Speaking of food, a common dinner meal was something called hoosh, a stew which combined a pounded meat paste called pemmican, hard biscuits, and snow.

Yeah, fine dining this was not.

Explorers drank tea and hot cocoa, which was considered an essential treat, and they also carried whiskey.

And as a side note, some of Shackleton's whiskey was recently discovered in a hut in Antarctica.

I have to say the urge to commit an Ocean's 11-style whiskey heist is strong.

Anyway, clearly Antarctic expedition was not for the faint of heart.

But despite the risks and discomforts, the lure of unexplored lands was too much for our heroes to ignore.

And so Rald Amundsen, Ernest Shackleton, and Robert Scott began their great race to the South Pole.

Beginning in 1898 when Amundsen was only 25, he was the first mate on a Belgian ship called the Belgica, which ended up trapped in Antarctic ice for an entire year.

The crew survived, but only by a thread.

But if you thought that that would put him off of the whole thing, then you'd be wrong.

Just five years later, he'd go on to lead the first successful expedition through Canada's Northwest Passage before starting once again to prepare for another attempt to reach the South Pole.

Meanwhile, Robert Scott and Ernest Shackleton teamed up in a crossover for the ages, co-leading a South Pole expedition.

They made it within 140 miles of their goal before being forced to turn back.

Beginning in 1907, Shackleton led another voyage to the South Pole.

This time they got within 97 miles, but once again had to turn around.

Closer and closer the competitors inched.

Fiercer and fiercer became the odds, and the nearer they got, the more dangerous the trip became.

In 1910, Amundsen and Scott were neck and neck, both on separate, simultaneous expeditions.

It was down to Norway versus Britain, and this time, there would be a winner.

The date was January 18th of 1912, when Scott's five-man crew finally reached the South Pole.

But what began as elation quickly turned to despair.

Because right there on what should have been barren, untouched ice sat an empty tent.

And this tent had a note inside, a note note from Amundsen.

The Norwegians, it turns out, had arrived on December 14th, a full 35 days prior.

Roal Amundsen had become the first human ever to set foot on the South Pole.

Alas, that wouldn't be the end of Scott's humiliation.

Far from it.

While Amundsen arrived home to celebration and renown, Scott's expedition would never reach home at all.

One by one, the five-man expedition perished on the journey back.

Frostbites and hunger, injuries sustained from falls.

Slowly, the doomed travelers were lost to the ice.

Now, grab a box of Kleenex because this story never fails to make me tear up.

According to Scott's diary, one member of the crew, Captain Lawrence Oates, had been suffering from gangrene and frostbite.

With each passing day, his movement became more and more labored.

He was slowing his comrades down, and he knew it.

Well, one night as the travelers shivered in their meager tent, Lawrence slowly stood up and walked to the door.

He looked to his fellow explorers one last time and then he uttered some of the most heart-wrenching final words in history.

I am just going outside, said Lawrence, and I might be some time.

Then he stepped out and bravely walked into a blizzard, sacrificing himself for his friends.

It was the day of his 32nd birthday.

The South Pole may have been found, but the explorers weren't finished.

Amundsen survived until 1928 when he disappeared on a rescue mission in the Arctic at the age of 55.

Shackleton would undertake numerous further expeditions, eventually dying of a heart attack, of all things, en route to a final Antarctic voyage in 1922.

And so, with its heroes gone, so too ended the heroic age.

But even so, tales of the explorers live on in our imaginations: stories of mystery, of bravery, of danger, and sometimes even a spark of the supernatural.

The young woman was in awe.

Great fields of ice stretched across the Arctic, gleaming and desolate.

When she climbed a hill for a better view, she saw strange beasts loping across the expanse.

Polar bears, foxes as white as bone, reindeer with wide, splayed antlers, like creatures from a fairy tale.

Bizarre animals that she had never encountered back home in England.

And suddenly, stark against the snow, there he was, the man she had traveled all this way to see.

Gaunt, yes, but miraculously alive.

And then, the woman awoke from her hypnotic trance.

She was back in England, warm and dry, surrounded by a room of eager faces.

It was time to tell them the good news.

Her psychic powers had worked.

Her mind had soared to the Arctic, and there, she had finally achieved what she had been hired to do.

She had located the missing explorer, Sir John Franklin.

Okay, let's rewind a bit, shall we?

It was the spring of 1845 when Sir John Franklin set out on an expedition to chart a northwest passage, and it wasn't Franklin's first rodeo either.

In fact, this marked his third attempt to find the theoretical sea route connecting the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans.

A discovery which, if found, would change trade and commerce forever.

Franklin led two ships, the HMS Erebus, named for the Greek god of darkness, and the HMS Terror, and these ships were as formidable as their names suggest.

Both had originally been built as bomb ships designed to withstand explosions, with hulls strong enough to smash through Arctic ice.

On top of that, they had built-in heating systems, which in 1845 was no small boast, and they ran on powerful steam engines converted from locomotives.

To keep the crew comfortable and well-fed, the ship carried nearly three years' worth of supplies, including over 7,000 pounds of tobacco, 2,700 pounds of candles, and numerous live cows.

Of course, no Arctic voyage would be complete without a few mascots.

Franklin's team had a pet dog named Neptune, a ship's cat to catch rats, and even a pet monkey presented to the expedition by Franklin's wife, Jane.

And if hanging out with a monkey weren't entertainment enough to while away the long hours at sea, the ships were also outfitted with lavish libraries containing over a thousand books.

So, with spirits high and a thirst for adventure, the crew of 24 officers and 110 men set sail in May of 1845, determined to make history.

And they would, but not for the reason they hoped, because little did they know, less than three months later, the entire expedition would vanish without a trace.

The Erebus and the Terror were last spotted by a whaling ship in Baffin Bay in late July.

But that was that.

No more signs of the ship.

No further communication.

It was like they had never existed at all.

Of course, communication at sea back then wasn't what it is today.

There was no GPS tracking, no radio signals.

Basically, loved ones back home would just mark their estimated return date on a calendar and then pray that you showed up when you were supposed to.

All of which is to say, no one really knew anything was wrong until three years later when the Erebus and the terror failed to show up on schedule.

After that, the search parties began.

Over the years that followed, a total of 39 expeditions would attempt to locate them, to no avail.

And yet, despite all indication of disaster, there was one person who refused to give up the search, Sir John Franklin's wife, Lady Jane Franklin.

She was convinced her husband was alive, and she made sure that all of England knew about it.

On one occasion, she adorned a search ship with a flag that she had made herself, emblazoned with the words, hope on, hope ever.

In March of 1854, though, the British Admiralty stopped paying the wages of Franklin and his men, effectively declaring them dead.

So, how did Jane respond?

Well, by appearing in public, not in widow's black, but in bright greens and pinks, a statement that she held out hope that her husband was alive.

She wrote letters to every public figure imaginable, from the Tsar of Russia to the President of the United States, urging them both to join the effort to find her missing husband.

But no matter what she did, and no matter how many search parties combed the seas, every expedition returned empty-handed.

Now, as we've learned time and time again, fear and grief make people do desperate things.

There are simply some truths that are too terrible to accept, and sometimes it's easier to believe in the impossible than in the tragic.

It's how we get stories like that of Mercy Brown, whose father insisted she was a vampire rather than admit that tuberculosis had destroyed his family.

After all, a vampire can be killed.

Tuberculosis, not so much.

It's why Sir Arthur Conan Doyle fell in love with the fairies, choosing to believe that his institutionalized father could see into the world of the Fae rather than admit to his madness.

And here, in the mid-19th century, Lady Jane Franklin herself would cling to the supernatural over the possibility that her husband might just simply be dead.

So, if the British Navy couldn't find her beloved, nor the Tsar or the President or any other of the countless crews of fellow explorers, then maybe, just maybe, the spiritualists could.

And so Jane went in search of a psychic.

They all tried.

First, there was Sarah, who claimed to see a vision of Franklin alive but, and I quote, poorly and tired.

Next, Jenny, who reported seeing the ships surrounded by ice and whose psychic power was magnified by a small drinking glass balanced on her nose.

Third came Emma, known as the Cirrus of Bolton, with visions of her own.

And so it went, woman after woman went into a trance, psychically traveled to the Arctic, and returned with news of Franklin's survival.

Now, if you're imagining opulent mediums draped in lush velvet robes, their hands floating over crystal balls, think again.

No, Sarah, Jenny, and Emma were all young, illiterate servant girls, and they were all doing the bidding of wealthy men.

It wasn't an uncommon practice, actually.

Male mesmerists would find an impoverished, illiterate young woman, a servant usually, and put her into a trance.

And then he would send her on psychic journeys to far-off lands.

Essentially, the women were used as tools, a sort of human telephone wire, linking their male employers to distant places.

And so, when Lady Jane Franklin decided spiritualism would be the key to finding her husband, these were the kinds of psychics she employed.

Emma, or the Sirus of Bolton, was the most famous of the bunch.

A poor English girl, she was the domestic servant of a man named Dr.

Joseph W.

Haddock.

Now, I'm not sure what possessed him to do this, but at some point, he began experimenting with giving his servants ether.

The ether he found would induce a trance, and while under, Emma seemed to possess certain psychic abilities.

She could accurately describe items hidden in boxes, for example.

And long before her work for the Franklin expedition, Emma's powers were even used to solve multiple robberies.

Haddock would put her in a good ol' ether-induced trance, and Emma would describe the location of missing money.

Then, lo and behold, when the authorities went to look for it, it would be found right where Emma said that it would.

Emma was also no rookie at being sent to distant lands.

On one occasion, she psychically visited Australia and was shocked to find that the seasons were reversed.

Another time, Haddock even claimed to have sent Emma to the moon, where she insisted to have encountered moon beings who were, and I quote, very small, dwarfs, not larger than children on our Earth.

Suffice to say, Haddock and Emma's exploits made quite a splash in the press, enough so that it caught the attention of Franklin's former secretary, Captain Alexander Makinoki.

And the good captain got in touch and requested the dynamic duo's help in locating the missing expedition.

The first thing that Haddock told Alexander was that for Emma to do her thing, she would need a sample of Franklin's handwriting and a lock of his hair, which the captain procured.

Then, objects in hand, Haddock administered his ether and Emma fell into a deep, impenetrable trance.

And it wasn't long before she found Sir Franklin and his men.

He was still alive, Emma claimed, although his cheeks were sunken and many of his men were dead.

She said that one of his ships had sunk while the other was wrecked or abandoned.

Over the course of three seances, Emma described the animals and the ice, the landscape and the sorry state of the surviving men.

At one point, she even described drinking some of Franklin's fish oil, which made her nauseous.

During each seance, Haddock and Captain Alexander Makanoki would ask questions of the hypnotized woman, and Emma would answer in epic detail.

But of course, there was one question that was more vital than all the rest.

Where the heck were the missing explorers?

To get Emma's answer, the men plopped an Arctic map on her head and told her to point.

Not exactly high science, I know.

Emma's finger landed on the northwest portion of Hudson Bay, which was odd because that was far from the area where Franklin supposedly went missing.

Later, she changed her mind, claiming that they were located in the Perry Islands, some thousand miles away from her first assertion.

Now, to be fair, Captain Makanoki was skeptical, to say the least.

But even so, he was open to the possibility that Emma's powers might be real.

In these days, he said, when we make the lightning carry our messages and the sun take our portraits, it is very difficult to draw the precise line betwixt the possible and the impossible.

And let me tell you, the impossible was only getting started because psychic girls are one thing, psychic ghosts are another.

The child's name was Louisa, although her family called her Weezy, and she was the three-year-old daughter of an Irish shipbuilder named William Copin.

She also just happened to be dead.

Weezy had been taken by gastric fever in May of 1849, but apparently three years on Earth weren't enough for her.

Allegedly, Weezy frequently appeared to her family as an apparition, or specifically appeared to her nine-year-old sister Anne, who claimed to see Little Weezy nearly every day.

Sometimes the toddler was dressed in beautiful robes, other times she took the form of a blue ball of light.

Now, when the Copen family saw news reports of the Cirus of Bolton's clairvoyant journeys to the Arctic, they were struck with an idea.

What if Anne asked Weezy about the Franklin expedition?

And that's exactly what the little girl did.

Anne went into her bedroom and spoke to her dead sister.

And as soon as she did, the temperature in the room dropped.

An Arctic scene appeared to Anne right there on the floor of her bedroom, where she saw two ships stuck in high drifts of snow.

Frantically, Anne began drawing what she saw, but stopped in shock when handwriting appeared on the wall of her bedroom.

Erebus and Terror, the words scrawled out, Sir John Franklin, Lancaster Sound, Prince Regent Inlet, Point Victory, Victoria Channel.

And immediately Anne announced that was it.

That was the location of the missing men.

Copin contacted Lady Jane Franklin and reported everything his daughter had seen.

At that point, you see, Jane was about to send an expedition northward, but after receiving word of Weezy's message, she commanded the captain to change course and sail toward Prince Regent Inlet instead.

But alas, her hope once again turned to despair when not one but two expeditions toward Prince Regent Inlet were forced to turn back.

And little did they know just how tantalizingly close they had been.

Today, the Franklin expedition is regarded as the greatest disaster in the history of British polar exploration.

And the story really does have it all.

Epic adventure, check.

Mysterious disappearance, check.

Shipwrecks, psychics, creepy little ghost girls, honestly, what's not to love?

And the fact that the exploratory age and the spiritualism movement just so happened to coincide, it's one of those perfect storms of spooky history.

Franklin's fate, though, was eventually discovered.

Through Inuit witness reports, it was determined that both ships had become trapped in sea ice back in 1846 in a place so remote the Inuit referred to it as, and I quote, the Back of Beyond.

Eventually, the men began to trek across the ice on foot, slowly dying of malnutrition, lead poisoning, and cold along the way.

When their bodies were located, the remains showed signs of having resorted to cannibalism.

One was even found with his face frozen in a horrifying grin.

As for Sir John Franklin himself, though, Well, in the late 1850s, British ships discovered a hidden note within a cairn telling of Franklin's death.

It said that he had died in June of 1847.

Which means, yes, it turns out that all that time, as Lady Jane sported her bright greens and pinks, as she sent ships across the waters, as the seirus of Bolton described Franklin's sallow yet hopeful face, he was already long in the grave.

Lady Jane was finally forced to accept the terrible truth.

Her husband would not be coming home.

And honestly, he still hasn't.

Because the thing is, to this day, no one has found Sir John Franklin's body.

Now sure, it's easy to get sucked into the dramatics of a story like this, but there is a subtler aspect I want to explore, no pun intended, I swear.

It's the fact that the Cirrus of Bolton and her fellow clairvoyants were servants, and not any servants, but illiterate young women.

These were individuals with absolutely no power in society.

no resources, no money, and certainly no means of pursuing adventures of their own.

Suddenly, here was a chance to rise above their station.

The women were invited into higher echelons of society.

They were respected and listened to.

No longer were they scrubbing pots and washing the laundry.

No, they were working as storytellers, spinning magnificent tales of far-off lands in lush seance parlors.

The upper class believed that as poor illiterate women, Emma and the others couldn't possibly be clever or imaginative enough to lie about their visions.

And so this classism allowed them to essentially say whatever they wanted and be believed.

It allowed them to sidestep class limitations and build brighter lives for themselves.

And not only that, but in a time when women of all social classes were forbidden from joining Arctic expeditions, these women were able to put themselves in the center of the Arctic zeitgeist.

It makes sense why these supposed clairvoyants would lean into the part, using Franklin's death to craft a better life.

But then again, perhaps there was more legitimacy to the women's claims than we might think.

Remember that note, the one in the cairn reporting of John Franklin's death?

Well, it just so happened to be found in a place known as Victory Point.

That's right, the very same words that Weezy had written on her sister's wall.

I hope you've enjoyed this journey into such a wild and harrowing bit of history.

After all, an explorer's life is a dangerous one.

To survive, you often only have your companions to rely on.

But what happens when those companions aren't of this world?

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We all know the feeling.

You're alone in your kitchen or driving home from from work or walking through a quiet forest when suddenly you're overcome by the feeling of being watched.

It's an eerie sensation to say the least.

The certainty that some invisible presence is there with you.

But sometimes an invisible companion might just save your life.

Many survivors of life or death situations have reported experiencing it.

A person may be clawing their way out of an avalanche or fleeing a burning building.

when suddenly they sense another person is there with them, cheering them on and helping them to survive.

Some interpret the presence as a guardian angel, others a ghost.

Others yet believe that it's a single entity who, throughout time, has appeared to those desperate and in need.

And legendary mountaineer Reinhold Messner interprets the sensation as the body simply generating a survival tool.

Whatever the case though, it's all come to be known by the same name, the third man factor.

And miraculously, it's much more common than you'd think.

Take the experience of Frank Smythe, a British explorer who was attempting to summit Mount Everest in 1933.

The rest of his party had abandoned their ascent due to adverse weather and lack of oxygen, but Smythe pressed on alone.

He failed to make it to the summit, but a funny thing happened on his way up.

Needing food, he pulled out a bar of Kendall mint cake.

Then, even without thinking about it, he broke it in half and turned around to give a share to a companion who he was suddenly sure was behind him.

As Smythe later recalled, At the time I was climbing alone, I had a strong feeling that I was accompanied by a second person.

The feeling was so strong that it completely eliminated all loneliness I might otherwise have felt.

For something more modern, consider Ron DiFrancesco's story.

He was working on the 84th floor of the World Trade Center's South Tower on September 11th of 2001.

After the second plane hit his building, DiFrancesco attempted to flee down an emergency stairwell that was quickly filling with smoke.

But that smoke overcame him, and he might have given up and choked if he hadn't heard a male voice address him by name.

It told him to get up to keep going and so he did, feeling a clear physical presence running along with him.

DiFrancesco would be the last person to make it out of the South Tower before it collapsed and only one of four survivors from above the 81st floor where the plane had hit.

Now, if you thought that we were done with the heroic age of Antarctic exploration, think again, because guess who else experienced the third man factor?

Ernest Shackleton.

During Shackleton's 1914 to 1917 Antarctic expedition, his ship Endurance became stranded in pack ice.

Shackleton and two other men set off on a perilous journey to get help from a whaling station nearly 700 miles away.

During their final stretch, as they marched for a grueling 36 hours through icy mountains and glaciers, Shackleton began to sense a presence trudging along with them.

Later, he would write, It seemed to me often that we were four, not three.

While he said nothing at the time, his two companions later confessed to also feeling the presence of a fourth man.

When a journalist later asked him about this experience, Shackleton replied, none of us cares to speak about that.

There are some things which never can be spoken of.

Almost to hint about them comes perilously close to sacrilege.

This experience was eminently one of those things.

Shackleton may not have wanted to talk about it, but that didn't keep one famous poet from writing about Shackleton's experience anyway.

As it turns out, the tale inspired lines from T.S.

Eliot's 1922 poem, The Wasteland.

Elliott wrote, Who is the third who walks always beside you?

When I count, there are only you and I together.

But when I look ahead up the white road, there is always another one walking beside you.

This episode of Lore was produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with writing by Jenna Rose Nethercott, research by Cassandra de Alba, and music by Chad Lawson.

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