Lore 252: Until Death

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people often claim that their love could move mountains but for one Indian man in the late 1950s he meant that literally in 1959 Dashroth Manji's beloved wife Falguni Devi suffered a fall she'd been attempting to cross a dangerous cliffside when she slipped leaving her grievously injured and she might have survived if that same mountain weren't blocking the only route to the nearest hospital.

Tragically, she passed away, leaving Dashroth Manji alone.

Now, it's safe to say that some people might have given in to sorrow after that, but not Manji.

No, he refused to let what happened to his wife happen to anyone else ever again.

And so, armed with only a hammer and a chisel, he began to dig.

Over the next 22 years, Manji single-handedly carved a 360-foot-long, 30-foot-wide, 25-foot-deep path right through the mountain.

By the time he was done, he had shortened what had once been a 35-mile journey between his town and that of the hospital to less than 10.

For his service, he was given the affectionate moniker, The Mountain Man.

And in 2016, India's Postal Service even put his face on a stamp.

If anything, Manji is proof that love defies boundaries.

It can transcend borders and backgrounds, class and faith, and yes, even cut through solid stone.

There are countless stories of people loving each other from opposite sides of a war or across wide, hungry oceans.

And sometimes, love can even crack through the greatest boundary of all, the one between life and death.

I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore.

Until death do us part.

It's a well-worn saying, evoking aisles strewn with rose petals and brides in long white veils.

The phrase has sort of been the wedding vow ever since the Book of Common Prayer was printed in 1549, and it's a powerful sentiment, to dedicate your life to another person so fully that only death itself could separate you.

But the thing is, marriage isn't always stopped by death.

In fact, sometimes being dead is an essential part of the deal.

Take, for example, the Chinese ghost marriage, also known as spirit marriage or Minghung.

The practice is a good 3,000 or 4,000 years old and honestly looks a lot like a regular marriage, except for a small difference.

One or more of the wedded parties is, well, deceased.

Now, why exactly would someone marry a corpse?

Or as it sometimes goes, marry two corpses to each other?

Well, it depends on the religion and the situation.

For one, there's a stigma around having an unwed daughter.

So if your daughter dies before being married, you can set her up with a nice dead boy and avoid embarrassment.

In mainland China, this is the most common form of a ghost marriage and essentially just involves burying the bodies of two unmarried people together.

In other locations, though, things get a little more haunted.

In Taiwan, it's not uncommon for a dead woman to show up in her mother's dreams and demand a husband, a still living husband, mind you, which the parents must provide.

In Singapore and Hong Kong, for example, a ghost marriage can prevent a deceased son or daughter from growing angry about their perpetual singledom and then taking revenge from beyond the grave.

It's practical, too.

Ghost marriages allow families to acquire a daughter-in-law or a son-in-law, even though their own child has passed on.

And it also, like any regular marriage, cements bonds between two families and allows a younger brother required to wait until the eldest has married to then go on and take a wife if the eldest dies unwed.

And then there's the tradition of Japanese doll marriages.

This actually rose to popularity pretty recently in the 1930s during the 15 years war.

More and more Japanese men were dying on the battlefield, often before having the chance to marry.

And so their families, particularly around the Tsugaru Peninsula, came up with a solution to try and give their sons peace in the afterlife and placate any pesky ghosts.

Instead of marrying a dead relative off to a living person or another corpse, they would be married to a doll.

But not just any doll.

This would be a figurine believed to hold the spirit of a bodhisattva named Jizo, who would provide compassionate partnership to the deceased.

Oh, and after the wedding, something strange is said to happen to this doll.

As time passes, its face will slowly morph to look exactly like the dead spouse.

It's tempting to feel a knee-jerk shiver down the spine at the thought of holding a wedding ceremony over a corpse, but given their cultural and legal context, these rituals honestly make a lot of sense.

And it makes sense too that when there's a demand for something, hustlers will find a way to commodify it.

You see, those Japanese dolls, well, they've become a booming industry.

The figurines are mass-produced in factories and can go for as high as 40,000 yen apiece, or roughly $2,600 in American currency.

And that's the least of it.

Chinese ghost marriages ended up leading to a bit of a body snatching problem.

In fact, legislation had to be put in place to keep people from stealing girls out of their graves to sell off as ghost brides, which unfortunately is still an issue today.

Between 2013 and 2016, 27 girls' bodies were reportedly stolen from their graves in just one small town in Shaxi province, with many more vanishing across the country.

And disturbingly enough, if if you peek at the news from as recently as 2017, you'll find murder cases in which women were killed so that their corpses could be sold as ghost brides.

Now, before you go and think that we here in America are exempt from this unsettling racket, well, let me tell you how wrong you might be.

Take the story of Lizzie and Mary Bangs, two Victorian-era spiritualists from Chicago.

As a publicity stunt, they hosted a wedding between a wealthy widow and her lover, a captain in the army.

And it's also worth mentioning that this handsome captain was, you guessed it, dead.

Now, when I say hosted a wedding, I mean all the bells and whistles, white gown, flowers, an ordained minister, you know, the works.

And of course, it wouldn't be complete without a ring.

When the time came for the gold band to be placed on the bride's finger, the Bangs sisters manifested the dead captain, who conveniently stepped out of a cupboard in full uniform.

He placed the ring on his beloved's finger, and the two were wed, sealed with a kiss.

How the Bang sisters managed to give a ghost a solid form that could both kiss and pick up wedding bands is anyone's guess.

Let's pray that a miracle took place.

If not, the minister may have said it best.

She wrote, I hope it was really a materialized spirit that was married, for if it was a man in earth life, he is married.

Sure enough.

Weddings are supposed to be days of joy.

They're all about celebrating love, after all.

And what could be more joyful than that?

So, when things go wrong and tragedy strikes, well, that contrast makes the sting all the more painful.

I'm sure you've heard variations of this story.

A bride who, on what should be the happiest day of her life, meets an untimely death.

Sometimes she dies right before her wedding, sometimes soon after.

But it always ends the same, with a forlorn woman haunting the daylights out of the living, still wearing her wedding dress, of course, a very literal thinning of the veil, so to speak.

There's a churchyard bride of Ireland, for example, who leads all who see her to their death, and the ghost bride of Vallacito, who died while traveling to meet her lover during the gold rush and now rides through the night on a headless horse.

And let's not forget about the ghost bride at the Chute de la Dom Blanche in Quebec, who, after her fiancée died in the Battle of Beauport, flung herself off a waterfall.

Hey, what can I say?

You really can't keep a good ghost bride down.

There might be no better example of this trope, however, than the White Lady of Kinsale, also known as the Bride of Charles Fort.

Charles Fort is about a mile and a half from the town of Kinsale, Ireland, and it's a huge star-shaped military stronghold built way back in 1682.

According to the legends, one of the fort's early commanders had a daughter, and this daughter fell in love with a guy named Sir Trevor.

On the evening of her wedding, she and her young groom walked arm in arm on the fort's ramparts, enjoying the night air and dreaming of the life ahead of them.

While walking, the bride peered over the walls and saw a flash of white on the grounds below.

Leaning to look closer, she realized what it was.

A rose.

A nearby sentry offered to climb down the ramparts to fetch the rose for her, so long as her new husband agreed to stand in his place for a bit, which I imagine seemed like a pretty good deal for the groom.

It was way easier to stand around than to scramble down a wall, right?

And so the groom put on the sentry's jacket and took up his post, as the sentry himself started the long descent to the ground.

But the guy was taking forever, so the bride went back to her chambers while Sir Trevor dutifully waited for the sentry to finish his job.

He waited and waited and waited some more until eventually Sir Trevor fell asleep, which is when the bride's father came upon him and mistaking his disguised son-in-law for a slacking soldier, shot him then and there.

Seems like a harsh punishment for a little nap, but hey, this was a different era.

By the time the commander realized his mistake, though, it was too late.

The groom was dead.

Talk about a shotgun wedding, right?

Suffice to say, the bride, well, she didn't take it too well.

When she heard what had befallen her new husband, she threw herself off the ramparts.

They say that she was still wearing her wedding gown when she jumped.

Her father, overcome by guilt, soon followed suit.

Now, look, there are no actual names or dates on record to link all of this with any actual history, but that hasn't kept the ghost stories from spreading.

For example, one major during the Peninsular War reported following a woman in an old-fashioned white dress up the fort stairs, before she vanished, that is.

Later, a nursemaid watched in terror as a lady in white glided to her sleeping ward's bed.

The spirit stroked the child's wrist, who cried out from the cold touch.

And then in 1880, a lieutenant and a captain were walking through the fort and both spotted, that's right, a woman in white.

She passed through a closed door right in front of their eyes.

And the sightings haven't slowed down yet.

A recent hotel manager spotted the doomed bride out on New Year's Eve.

A runner, stopping to fix his shoe against the side of the fort, felt something grab his hand.

Multiple officers have even reported an invisible force shoving them down the stairs.

But don't take my word for it.

Go find out for yourself.

Charles Fort is still a popular tourist destination.

There are tea rooms, daily tours, and you can even rent it out for weddings.

It must have been a hard place to grow up.

Nantgo Thern is a windswept and secluded valley that sits on a peninsula in Wales, jutting into the Irish Channel.

Today, the nearest bus stop is a town away, and the closest train station, even farther.

And back in the 18th century, well, let's just say that there wasn't much of a nightlife.

In fact, as of around 1770, we know that there were only three farms in the whole valley.

And if the stories are to be believed, the residents of those farms would become the the stuff of legend.

According to a local folktale, two of these farms stood on opposite sides of a ravine.

In one lived a young man named Rhys and his two sisters.

In the other lived their uncle and his daughter, a beautiful young woman named Maynier.

Rhys's sisters were sickly, and so he and Maynir spent most of their childhoods together, just the two of them.

It must have been hard to get away and feel independent in a place so small, but Rhys and Maynir found a spot that could be theirs and theirs alone.

It was a huge old oak tree growing at the foot of a nearby mountain.

There, they could watch the sheep graze, listen to the wind howl, and just be together.

The years went on, and slowly that friendship turned to love, and luckily too, because the dating pool hadn't left them with many options.

They decided to marry and set a wedding date for a warm weekend in June.

When the day came, friends and family from far away were glad to make the trip to Little Nantgothern with plenty of food and gifts in tow.

And when they arrived, it was time for the traditional Welsh wedding quest.

Here's how it works.

The groom and his friends would come to the bride's family home the morning of the wedding and the bride would make a break for it.

Then the groom's male friends would try to chase her down, pursue her into the hills until they captured her and carried her to the chapel.

It was meant to be a light-hearted way to get everyone laughing.

And if we ignore the metaphorical implications of forcibly abducting a woman to become a bride, I'm sure it was a fun time, leaving everyone in high spirits, the couple included.

At least that is how it's supposed to go.

On the morning of Maynear's wedding, the men from the village came for her.

Playing along with the festivities, she ran and they let her escape.

First, she hid in the hay bales, but they found her pretty quickly.

Being good sports, they gave her a second chance.

And so with a bright smile, she darted off once again.

this time vanishing into the wilds of the valley.

Meanwhile, back of the church, the wedding festivities were in full swing.

The Welsh loved a wedding, even if it was for the weird hermit couple who lived at the edge of the island.

The groom and his guests played music, joked, danced, and adorned themselves with wildflowers as they waited for the groomsman and Maynier to arrive.

But hours went by and still no bride.

People were starting to get antsy, and what had been a lively afternoon soured into an anxious evening.

Soon, the same question was on everyone's lips.

Where on earth was the the bride?

Her poor groom hadn't stopped watching the path, expecting his love to appear at any moment.

But as the day wore on, Rhys grew more and more worried.

So, when at last his friends returned empty-handed, his worst fear was confirmed.

Mainir was officially missing.

What had started as a wedding party became a search party, continuing all through the night.

But the bride was never found.

According to the legend, Rhys went mad with grief.

He wandered the hills like a wild man, not caring if he slept or bathed, just endlessly searching for his lost bride.

Years passed, and all the while he never stopped looking.

And every so often, he would visit their oak tree, the one where he and Maynier had first fallen in love.

Well, one day a storm rose up and Rhys took shelter under that tree.

And sure enough, as the grieving man huddled below its branches, a bolt of lightning struck, splitting the oak right down the center.

And when it did, something fell out of the hollow trunk.

A skeleton wearing a bridal gown.

With horror, Rhys realized what had happened.

His bride-to-be must have climbed into an opening in the trunk to hide from the wedding party and then became stuck.

Trapped, hungry, and terrified, she had died there.

The very place where their love was born had also become her tomb.

Some versions of this story say that Rhys, overcome with grief, died right there in the rain, his sweetheart's skeleton cradled in in his arms.

And it's said that to this day, no birds will land on that oak tree's branches.

Now, if you're like me, you're wondering how much of this story is true.

Yes, it's a fact that there were only three families in the area back in the 18th century.

But what about the couple?

And more importantly, what about the tree?

Well, there's no proven tree with a skeleton inside, but the town has designated a symbolic tree where visitors can pay their respects to the doomed sweethearts.

And this story is a big deal in that town.

They even hosted a race named after the story called the Rhys and Maynier race.

Oh, and then there are the ghosts as well.

Fishermen have reported seeing the skeleton bride standing at the ocean's edge, her arms raised high and her crown of flowers still resting atop her pale skull.

Others have seen a couple walking hand in hand on the beach.

One figure is said to have long hair and a wild beard, while the other has empty eye sockets in her skeletal face.

But if those reports are true, it also means that this tale actually has a happy ending.

The couple may not have had much time together while they were alive, but in death, their love is eternal.

It's simple math.

The average human spends about 29,000 days on this planet.

And while most of those days are just spent, well, living, there are some that stand out more than others.

The day you're born, the day you have your first kiss or get your first job, or your kid is born, the day you get married.

We remember them because they're days that represent beginnings, the start of something bigger.

At least they should.

And so, if one of those special days ends up being your last, it almost feels like a betrayal, potential snuffed out like a flame.

When I first heard the Rhys and Maynier story, it felt oddly familiar.

And sure, I could chalk that up to the fact that you can't seem to throw a rock without hitting a ghost bride, thanks to how common these stories are.

But this one felt specific.

And then I realized why.

There's an urban legend I grew up hearing that has almost the exact same plot.

Replace the game of the wedding quest with modern hide and seek and things start to look a lot more recognizable.

Here, let me jog your memory.

A wedding party gathers in a big house and decides to play a game of hide and seek.

The bride runs off to hide and the groom starts to look for her.

But no matter where he searches, he can't find his new wife anywhere and neither can anyone else.

If there were a hide-and-seek Olympics, this woman would get the gold medal because she was never seen again.

As the legend goes, 50 years pass when new residents in that house make a morbid discovery.

Cracking open an old oak chest long forgotten in the attic, they find a skeleton wearing a wedding dress.

That's right.

The bride, it turns out, had been snug in her hiding place all along.

She had climbed into the trunk only to gasp in horror when the lid snapped shut, trapping her inside.

The first written version of this story appeared in an 1822 poem called Ginerva, but it likely stretches back a lot farther.

And of course, it is hard not to notice the similarities between this and the story of poor Mainir, the festive hiding game on the wedding day, the missing bride, the eventual reveal of a skeleton still draped in its wedding finery.

And of course, one tiny but essential detail: both brides died inside an oak trunk.

Wedding ceremonies are sweet, but do you know what's even sweeter?

Wedding cake.

But it turns out there's more to this frosted confection than meets the eye, as one more story we've tracked down will show us.

Stick around through this brief sponsor break to hear all about it.

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The year was 1863 and the Civil War was only halfway over.

The United States had been reduced to a bloody battleground and morale was low.

In short, the people needed something to cheer them up.

And on February 10th, they received just that.

A huge wedding.

Or rather, should I say a very small wedding.

You see, this was the day that Lavinia Warren married Charles Stratton, or as you might know him, General Tom Thumb.

Standing at only 35 inches tall, Stratton was one of the most famous stars of the time, performing with the Barnum and Bailey Circus.

His bride, Lavinia, was of similar stature and performed as his co-star.

Their New York wedding was extravagant.

In fact, Barnum and Bailey sold 5,000 tickets to the event.

But while that shindig is a century and a half in the past now, a little something of it remains.

That is, the cake.

Today, both the Library of Congress and the Barnum Museum have small slices of Charles and Lavinia's actual wedding cake, preserved for the past 150 years.

And weirdly, this is not the only wedding cake squirreled away by the U.S.

federal government.

They also saved a slice from President Eisenhower's wedding cake from July of 1916.

And it doesn't end there.

At the Grover Cleveland Birthplace Museum in Caldwell, New Jersey, you can find a 130-year-old slice of President Cleveland's wedding cake, albeit with one corner missing.

According to the story, a visiting Cub Scout back in the 1950s let his cravings get the better of him and he snuck a single forbidden bite.

In 2021, a slice of Princess Diana's 1981 wedding cake sold for £1,850.

And look, look, as someone who's always a little tempted by ancient wheels of cheese found in tombs and butter pulled out of bogs, I get it.

A preserved cake can keep some of the wedding magic alive long after the wedding itself is dead and gone.

The cake is the centerpiece of the event after all.

Sharing that tall layered confection has become one of the most beloved and delicious wedding traditions that we have.

But most of us are too busy licking the plate to stop and wonder where the whole idea came from.

Well, it turns out wedding cakes have been a part of Western weddings since antiquity.

It probably started in ancient Greece, moving quickly to Rome.

Now, Roman weddings were closed out by breaking a wheat or barley cake over the bride's head for good luck and fertility.

The bride and groom would then eat the cake together and the guests would gather any leftover crumbs for their own good fortune.

And before you give the whole crumbs in the air thing a side eye, it's worth noting that many still practice a version of this today, when newlyweds smash a fistful of cake into each other's faces.

Now, in medieval England, they had a slightly different ceremonial snack.

This one involved stacking spiced buns into as high a tower as possible.

And if the bride and groom could kiss over the pile, they would be blessed with good luck.

By the 1600s, though, the buns had been replaced with what was called a bride's pie, but this wasn't your grandma's apple pie.

No, the filling included things like mutton, oysters, pine kernels, and uh sheep's testicles.

Yeah, you can take a moment to digest that if you need to.

The same 1685 recipe that called for these delightful ingredients also included a compartment in the pie for live birds or even a snake.

This was naturally to give the guests a fun surprise as they slice the pie open.

Girls jumping out of cakes?

That's boring.

Live snakes flying out of a pastry crust?

Now that is a party.

During the 17th century, English bride's pies gradually turned into cakes.

Two cakes to be exact, one groom's cake and one bride's cake.

The groom's cake was usually a dark fruit cake that could be cut into squares for the wedding guests to take home.

But not to eat, mind you.

No guests would place the cake under their pillows.

It was believed that if a bridesmaid slept with the slice beneath her head, she would dream that night of her own future husband.

Luckily for the abused bedsheets of England, though, this eventually fell out of fashion.

Brides' cakes, unlike groom's cakes, were covered in icing, usually a white icing, but the color had nothing to do with purity.

In fact, the idea of white representing purity wasn't really established until the Victorian era.

No, in the 1600s, the white frosting meant one thing and one thing only, money.

To achieve that pearly hue, the icing would have to be made from the most expensive sugar on the market.

So the whiter the bridal cake, the more of a status symbol that cake became.

Oh, and that icing?

It was rock hard, by the way.

Brides had to be equipped with a special saw just to hack off a piece.

Status symbol or no, the cakes were pretty simple.

Up until the 19th century, wedding cakes were usually a single layer fruit cake covered in almond paste and encrusted in that white sugar icing.

But then came Queen Victoria, and one thing she was not was simple.

Victoria and Prince Albert's ornate 1840 wedding cake set the stage for the elaborate modern wedding cakes we see today.

It was still only one layer of a plum cake, but it was gigantic.

I'm talking a circumference of 10 feet and weighing 300 pounds.

The cake was decorated with sculptures of the newlyweds dressed in traditional Roman garb, plus one of Victoria's beloved dogs, turtle doves, cupids, and more, all in shimmering white.

If a baked good could be a celebrity, well this one really takes the cake.

For a week leading up to the wedding, a portrait of the pastry hung in every print shop window in London.

The cake was so famous that the middle class started playing royal cake copycat, serving their own white icing covered sculpture-laden creations.

In fact, that's where the term royal icing comes from.

But it was 42 years later at Prince Leopold's nuptials that the last few ingredients were tossed into the batter, finalizing the style that we know today.

This, you see, was the first wedding cake to fight gravity by having multiple edible tears.

The classic towering wedding cake with all its sugary adornments and cake toppers was officially born.

Hard royal icing was replaced with softer icing in the 1980s, but other than that, traditional wedding cakes have remained largely unchanged since the Victorian era.

And it all harkened back to one simple superstition: a broken barley cake for luck thousands of years in the past.

But hey, if you have a wedding coming up and you want to do something extra special for your guests, nothing says true love like a pie crust full of snakes.

This episode of lore was produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with writing by Jenna Rose Nethercott, research by Alex Robinson, and music by Chad Lawson.

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