Lore 240: Brick by Brick

This is the story of the one.

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Let's be honest, life is hectic.

Between work and family and friends and chores, it can be hard to find time for yourself.

We all find ourselves longing for peace and quiet from time to time, a moment alone with a book or a creative project, or even just time to sit and think.

And in November of 2021, one woman finally received just that for 500 days in a cave 230 feet below ground.

50-year-old Beatriz Flamini is an extreme athlete from Spain.

She was participating in a research expedition called Time Cave in collaboration with the University of Granada.

The goal was to study how extended isolation and lack of sunlight might affect a person's experience of time.

And to Flamini, the challenge sounded like like just her cup of tea.

After being lowered into the cave, Flamini spent the next year and a half alone, reading, weaving, exercising, drawing, and preparing meals.

And what did she say when the scientists finally came to retrieve her on April 14th of 2023?

I didn't want to come out yet, she said.

Already?

No way.

I hadn't finished my book.

Now, if you're feeling your chest tighten at the very idea of this story, you aren't alone.

What was a dream come true to Beatrice Flamini would be for many of us a nightmare.

Claustrophobia is of course one of our oldest and most common human fears, and horror writers have made use of this for centuries.

Like Edgar Allan Poe's The Cask of Monteado.

If you've ever read it, then no doubt the final horrifying image is burned permanently into your mind.

A man, deep in a catacomb, far from sympathetic ears, being bricked up alive against his will.

It's a terrifying story, the kind that makes us shiver while reading it.

But thankfully, it was only that.

A story.

But unfortunately, that isn't exactly the case because emirment, the act of sealing a living person into a wall or tomb, is far from fictitious.

In fact, it's a chilling fate that has befallen real victims throughout history.

And it's time we unpack the truth behind the legend: one brick at a time.

I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is lore.

The word immure is derived from the Latin words in and muris, meaning in or into, and wall.

Pretty straightforward as far as etymology goes.

But the practice itself is far less simple.

From a way to punish criminals to torturous political execution to superstitious human sacrifice, immurement has been doled out for nearly as many reasons as there were victims.

Take the immurement of the Vestal Virgins, for example, which we've covered here before.

As you recall, Vestal Virgins were an order of priestesses in ancient Rome who served Vesta, the goddess of the hearth, and a protector of Rome.

These Vestal Virgins were responsible for keeping the fire of the Temple of Vesta perpetually burning.

If it went out, it would be seriously bad news, because it meant that the goddess's protection of Rome would also snuff out.

So, suffice to say, Vesta's priestesses couldn't afford distractions, and that's where the virgin part came in.

Hard to tend to an eternal flame if you're busy romping around with some handsome gladiators, right?

And breaking that vow was more than just a sin.

It was essentially treason, since they were putting Rome itself in danger.

It was sacrilegious, however, to kill a Vestal Virgin.

To punish one who broke her vow of chastity, they had to find more creative methods.

And what's a way to execute someone you aren't allowed to physically kill?

That's right.

Immurement.

Vestal virgins who broke their chastity vows would sometimes be sealed into tombs alive.

That way, no one had to execute them.

Starvation or suffocation would take care of that, and the state's hands would be clean.

The victim would be stripped of her badges of office, dressed like a corpse, and led down into her vault while her sisters wept looking on.

The tomb contained only a couch, a lamp, and a table with a small amount of food, which would obviously run out way too soon.

I can only imagine the horror these priestesses must have felt staring at the final bite of bread, that last handful of dried fruit.

as the lamplight began to dim.

There were about 10 recorded cases of Vestal Virgin immerement, which, given the order existed for about a thousand years, is luckily a fairly low frequency.

But still, I can't help but feel like that's 10 too many.

But Vestal Virgins weren't the only religious figures in history to be punished that way.

In 1409, for example, four Christian clerics in Ausburg, Bavaria were accused of pedophilia.

First, the men were forced into wooden coffins and locked inside.

Then the church suspended the coffins with ropes inside a tall tower where the clerics were left to starve.

In another case, in the year 1149, Duke Otto III of Olomutz, part of the Moravian Premishlid dynasty, claimed that an abbot had molested his wife.

So he did the only reasonable thing.

He had the abbot and 20 other monks immured in the monastery refractory as punishment, where they all starved to death.

And of course, he seized the monastery's wealth too, you know.

as punishment, which, yeah, does seem a bit suspicious in retrospect.

But immurement wasn't just for punishing transgressions.

It was also a means of political execution.

In India in the year 1660, Shah Shoshah, the second son of an emperor, was on the run.

He ended up trying to overthrow the Arakanese king, and let's just say that it didn't go over very well.

Shah Shushah was killed, but the king didn't stop in his execution.

He also killed all of Shah Shusha's children.

The sons were beheaded, but the daughters had it even worse.

They were immured in their own apartments and left to die.

And then there's Flavius Basilicus, the emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire from 475 to 476 CE.

Once overthrown, he and his family were sealed up in either a cistern or a tower, where they died of starvation and cold.

And hey, remember our old friend Elizabeth Boutry, the serial killer who turned her lavish home into a torture chamber for young women?

She too was immured within her home, where she was supplied with food until she died four years later.

Consider it an extreme version of house arrest.

Sometimes though, immurement wasn't about crime and punishment at all.

In fact, in many instances throughout history, to be immured was quite the opposite.

It was considered holy.

Take for instance the children of Yuye Yako.

In 1999, archaeologists discovered three perfectly preserved ancient Incan mummies on the border of Chile and Argentina, sealed in a small tomb one and a half meters underground.

All three were children, and they appeared to have been human sacrifices.

Examination of the remains revealed that the children were likely selected for sacrifice a year prior, being fed fine foods like maize and animal protein, as well as being heavily drugged before their sacrificial day.

Once the children had fallen asleep due to the alcohol and cacao they were fed, they were then sealed alive into a tomb within the Uyayako volcano.

And there they remained for 500 years.

Whether used for ritual or retribution, closing a person into their own grave brick by brick sounds like a fate worse than death.

It's honestly hard to imagine a crime worthy of that kind of punishment.

But the thing is, sometimes immurement had nothing whatsoever to do with the person immured.

Often it was less about the victim and more about the vault.

There are all sorts of lucky charms out there, right?

Rabbit's feet, four-leaf clovers, human corpses.

And if that last one seems out of place, well, it's actually not.

It's pretty common.

The practice has different names in different cultures.

Dasheng Shuang in China, Hito Bashira in Japan, Miyo Sade in Burma.

But it all refers to the same kind of thing, sealing a person inside a construction project, usually a bridge or a building, to make the structure stronger.

Now, if you're like me, you're asking yourself one simple question at this point, right?

Why?

What exactly does any of this achieve?

Well, a number of things, it turns out.

Sometimes human pillars, as they were called, were intended as sacrifices to the gods and spirits of the earth who were being disturbed in order to build the structure in question.

In other cases, the spirits of the dead would become a phantom guardian, protecting the structure from harm.

And oftentimes, it was both.

One story from Hampi, India, tells of a wall with a history of falling down.

So a pregnant woman is buried beneath it to make sure that it would stay standing.

To this day, the wall is sacred to women pilgrims.

And then there is the Balkan ballad, The Bridge of Arta, which follows a group of masons hard at work on building a bridge.

They labor all day, only to watch the bridge collapse each night.

One day, a talking bird comes to them, you know, as talking birds do, and proclaims that, if you bury not a human being, no bridge can be strong.

But not just any human being.

The gods demanded the head mason's wife.

So the builders tell the wife that her husband has dropped his ring into the foundation pit and asks her to go down and retrieve it.

She dutifully descends, and then the masons seal her in.

This idea of closing your wife into a foundation is so common, in fact, that legendary folklorist Alan Dundees even edited an entire book about it called The Walled Up Wife.

In Japan, human pillars were common practice from ancient times through the 16th century.

Japan's Maruoka Castle, Matsue Castle, and Matsui Ohashi Bridge are all rumored to have been built with the help of human sacrifice.

Legend says when the Matsue Ohashi Bridge was being built in 1608, the builders grew more and more despairing because every time they tried to embed a pillar in the river, it was swallowed up by water and sediment.

There seemed to be no solid ground to build on.

And so they decided to try another approach.

That's right, a human pillar.

The workers seized a man named Gensuki and buried him alive in the riverbed beneath the bridge's middle pillar.

And how did poor Gensuki earn his fate, you might ask?

Well, by wearing his trousers, wrong.

Yes, Yes, you heard that right.

The builders had decided that the first man to cross without having his hakama, a traditional kind of pants, properly pleated, would be the chosen sacrifice.

And Gensuki, well, he'd left his house a little sloppy that morning.

Talk about fashion police, right?

It's said that for centuries after, ghostly red fire would flicker around the bridge on moonless nights.

Yes, centuries, because after Gensuki's emirment, the bridge held firm.

Okay, I'll admit, some believe that Gensuki is actually the name of an era and not a man at all, misinterpreted by dialect and time.

But stories don't need to be true to hold power.

The legend was so popular that whenever a new bridge was built, townsfolk would flee the area in terror, afraid that they might be the next human pillar.

Now, lest you think there's no room for fun and games when it comes to walling people up alive, fear not.

While there is definitely debate on the topic, some scholars believe that the popular children's song, London Bridge is Falling Down, is in fact about immuring a human sacrifice in London Bridge itself.

The bridge is even said to have been, and I quote, sanctified by the blood of children.

It's hard to know for sure how many of these legends are true.

After all, many of the buildings are still standing, so whether or not they contain a body is unknown.

That said, old buildings often need restoration, and when that happens, well, sometimes ghastly discoveries are made.

Like the skeleton found in the wall of a parish church in Devon, England when the building was restored in 1885, or the one found in Wickenby in Lincolnshire, buried in the foundation of the West Wall.

Over in Germany, the castle of Niedermanderscheid was said to have been built around a young woman.

In 1844, they decided to find out once and for all if it was true, so they broke open the wall where the legend claimed that she had been immured.

And sure enough, there was a skeleton there.

And look, people of our time aren't the only ones to see this practice as barbaric.

Past peoples also recognized that immurement wasn't necessarily ideal.

So sometimes stand-ins were used.

Effigies or dolls were embedded in foundations, often resembling a specific person.

Animal sacrifice was even used.

But my personal favorite?

Shadows.

That's right, sometimes rather than immure a person, builders in Greece and what is today Transylvania among others others, would simply immure the person's shadow.

First, the shadow would be measured, then the shadow's owner would stand so that the shadow fell upon the foundation stone, sometimes even being nailed in place.

Then it would be sealed into the wall.

It seems like a good compromise, except for one teeny side effect.

Anyone whose shadow was immured would die within 40 days.

We don't know a lot about Julian of Norwich.

We don't know who her parents were or the circumstances in which she was raised.

We don't know her birthday.

We don't even know her real name, Julian simply being the name of the church, Saint Julian, with which she came to be associated.

What we do know is that on May 13th of 1373, when Julian of Norwich was 30 years old, she just so happened to be dying.

She was sick and bedridden, plagued with strange dreams and pain, and she knew her time on earth was limited.

First, she went numb from the waist down.

Next, the numbness crept up to her neck, her breath grew short, and then, just as death felt nearest, her pain disappeared.

That's when she received 16 divine visions from God.

She saw God hand her a small object the size of a walnut.

And when she asked what it was, he said it was all things.

She was struck by the fragility of this, the universe in her palm.

She saw Christ in his crown of thorns.

So plenteously, she would later write, the hot blood ran out that there was neither seen skin nor wound, but as it were, all blood.

Her visions were horrific and overwhelming, but while they terrified her, they also filled her with an immense sense of God's love.

And once the revelations finally ended, she miraculously survived her illness.

And she decided to dedicate the rest of her life to being an anchoress.

What exactly is an anchoress?

Well, let's just say that not all immurement was involuntary.

Anchoresses were women who consented to be walled up within a cell for an ascetic life of spiritual contemplation.

And when I say walled up, I mean immured.

They would be bricked into a cell with no way out.

But the intent wasn't to kill or or starve them.

Rather, the anchoresses would be passed food and water to survive while they lived hermetic, simple lives of prayer.

The cells were attached to the church itself, so the immured were permanent residents of the church.

An anchoress's cell was no more than 12 feet square, usually closer to 8 feet square.

While there were no doors, the cell would have three small windows.

One window opened to a parlor, allowing servants to deliver food and supplies, as well as ferry waste out.

Another tiny window window opened into the church so that the anchoress could observe the services and take the Eucharist, and one opened to the outside world.

None of them, however, were large enough for a person to pass through.

Once sealed in, they would never leave again.

Inside the cell, one might find a small table and a chimney for heat.

There was also a pit dug into the ground.

This pit was where the anchoress would kneel each day in prayer, and eventually, that pit would become her grave.

In fact, when an anchoress was first sealed into her cell, a priest recited prayers typically reserved for funerals, symbolizing that the ascetic was now dead to the outside world.

Now, anchoresses weren't all women.

Their male equivalents were called anchorites, but it was far more common for women to volunteer to be recluses than for men to.

In fact, twice as many women than men were immured in the 14th and 15th centuries, and three times as many in the 13th century.

And I know what you're thinking.

There can't have been that many of them because who on earth would volunteer for this?

But actually in the medieval age, it was pretty popular.

In England between the 13th and 15th centuries, there were a good 200 anchoresses and anchorites actively living in cells.

It seems like Beatrice Flamini, that Spanish athlete who spent 500 days in a cave, wasn't the first woman to seal herself behind stone to get some peace and quiet.

Anchoresses could have visitors though, and in fact, church members would often go to to them for advice and wisdom.

Imagine it like a confessional booth, but one where the priest could never leave.

Frequent visitors were discouraged, but you could have a chat every now and then.

Of course, anchoresses could never have visitors within their cells, but most portraits of Julian of Norwich do portray her with a companion, right there in her lap.

It was a cat, probably just small enough to slip in and out of the windows.

Who knew that the ultimate cat lady was a medieval woman living behind a wall?

An anchoress's day consisted mostly of prayer.

She also did handiwork making lace or working with metals, or as in the case of Julian of Norwich, writing one of the greatest works of mystic literature the English-speaking world has ever known.

Not long after receiving her visions, she wrote a book referred to as the short text of the revelations of divine love.

Later in her cell, she wrote an extended exploration of the visions called the long text of the revelations of divine love.

We don't know exactly how long after having these visions that Julian of Norwich became an anchoress, but we do know that she remained immured for more than 20 years, well into her 70s.

The results, however, had one revolutionary after-effect.

Her Revelations of Divine Love volumes were the first books ever written in English by a woman.

The fear of small spaces is very real and very common.

I myself have a deep fear of tiny enclosed places that make me feel trapped.

And whenever I've brought it up in conversation, it always elicits nods of agreement from everyone else in the room.

It's not universal, but it certainly covers the majority of us, doesn't it?

But there's always a twist, right?

Yes, for some, immurement was a horrific form of torture, to be feared and fled from.

For others, a necessary evil to appease the gods.

And for others still, it was a path into a holy life of prayer, solitude, and community power.

Any ritual, it seems, can be wielded for punishment or peace, depending on its application.

And sometimes, it was both.

Remember how we said that Julian of Norwich was often depicted with a cat?

Well, despite the discouragement of frequent visitors, more permanent companions for anchoresses weren't heard of.

But the thing is, they weren't always cats.

In fact, they weren't always animals at all.

Some were children.

Historical records show instances in which parents would donate a child under the age of 10 to the church.

It was a devotional act, the ultimate sacrifice to prove their love of God, and sometimes to relieve themselves of one more mouth to feed while they're at it.

And the child they knew knew would never go hungry because it would be cared for by the church.

Of course, when I say cared for, what I mean is that the child would be walled in with an anchoress to keep her company.

And there, the two companions would remain, one by choice and the other by force, snug within a cell for decades.

Here at Lore, we love a full circle moment.

There's nothing more satisfying than a story that can be tied up with a neat little bow.

And in our research on amerement, we happen to stumble onto just that.

But to prove it, we have to return to the beginning with another look at the cask of Amantillado.

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Eloceano nos deleta.

Algunos el maravillan antel colorido mundo vajulas superficial.

Elo seano nos alimenta.

Otros en cuentransustento en swabundancia.

Elo seano nos insenia.

Qué nuestras decisiones diaras affectan casta los lugares más profundos.

El lo seano nos mube.

Ya sía sufiendo na hola, or admirando su impersionante vejeza.

Elos seano nos connecta.

Descovere tú conection en Monterrey Bay Aquarium punto ore que viagonal conectar.

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Edgar Allan Poe's short story, The Cask of Amantiado, didn't come from nowhere.

And I don't just mean the long history that we've just explored.

No, I'm talking about something specific.

Because in fact, The Casque of Amantiado was likely based, unfortunately, on a true story.

In 1844, Reverend Joel Taylor Headley, a contemporary of Poe's and a famed writer in his own right, was on a trip to Italy.

Headley and a friend were wandering the small town of San Giovanni in what I imagine was an afternoon of fine food, warm weather, and lively conversation.

At some point though, the two companions decided to pay a visit to the church of San Lorenzo, there in the town.

Headley was a reverend after all, and probably wanted to spend a few moments in prayer.

But when they entered the church, a place that should have been holy, the men were both horrified and mesmerized to discover an example not of God's love, but of human cruelty.

Receiving a tour of the space, the men were shown an open hole in the wall, covered only by a thin trapdoor.

Behind the trapdoor stood an upright human skeleton.

Apparently, the skeleton had been discovered there within the wall a number of years earlier, during some construction work on the church.

After finding it, the clergy had, for whatever reason, decided to leave it in place pristine and undisturbed.

Not your typical choice for interior decorating, but hey, who am I to judge?

The image of that walled-in man stuck with Headley, haunting him long after he'd returned to America.

And as a writer, Reverend Headley processed what he'd seen in the only way he knew how, by writing.

Later that same year, he published a letter in the Columbian magazine, which he titled, A Sketch, A Man Built Into a Wall.

Though the actual history of this poor victim was unknown, Headley's letter was full of lively speculation.

In a a dark night, Headley wrote, the workman began at the feet, and with his mortar and trowel built up the same carelessness he would exhibit in filling any broken wall.

The successful enemy stood leaning on his sword and watched the face of the man he hated but no longer feared.

At length, the solid wall rose over his chest.

So, like Poe's story, this featured an Italian man immured as an act of revenge.

In both, the men in question were of high rank, and looking at the language of the letter next to the cask of Amatillado descriptions feel eerily similar.

As the final stone is sealed into place in Headley's writing, for example, the victim lets out a groan.

In Poe's version, a low, desperate laugh.

But is it all coincidental?

How do we know that Poe would never have seen this letter?

Well, the issue of the Columbian magazine where the letter appeared happens to be the very same one that contained Poe's article on mesmeric revelation.

In fact, Poe even mailed a copy of the issue to a few of his friends.

And hey, sure, it's possible that he missed it at the time, but the letter just so happened to be published again in 1845 in the New York Evening Mirror.

And we know that Poe read The Mirror, especially in 1845, because that same year he trusted the mirror to publish a work of his own, a work that had never been released before, a little poem called The Raven.

It seems that truth really is stranger than fiction.

And while Headley's letter has been largely forgotten, Poe's story sure hasn't.

Thanks to him, one unidentified man who met a grisly end in a small Italian town has, for lack of a better term, forever been cemented in history.

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

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