Lore 238: Rumors

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Rumor had stirred the city into a panic.

You know how it goes, right?

A story begins to be told and a sizable enough portion of the population buys into it, transforming it into something bigger, something more powerful.

You see, the king had issued a royal edict the year before that was meant to empty the streets of homeless people all over Paris.

The rich nobility didn't want to see them anymore and that included children, so the police had been rounding them up and taking them to places of detention.

Oh and one other little detail.

Those police officers were paid a fee for this per arrest.

You can see how that might get out of hand, right?

So the people of Paris rioted, but not because they were rejecting a royal edict.

No, it was because a rumor had replaced the truth and taken control of the narrative.

A rumor that said that King Louis XV had become a leper and was bathing in the blood of children to cure himself.

People protested, threats against the king were made, and looking back, the seeds of the coming revolution were planted, all because people didn't want to believe the logical truth, but instead clung to a wild, fantastical fiction.

Thankfully, that sort of thing would never happen today, but it certainly begs us to stop and think about the power of rumor and the way in which lies and fabrications can take on a life of their own, oftentimes overpowering the truth in the court of public opinion.

And it should cause us to rightly fear those moments.

Because if history is any indication, rumor can lead us down some very dark roads.

I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is lore.

In June of 1779, just three years after the Declaration of Independence and in the distant lands of the American Midwest, two men were executed for witchcraft.

Specifically, they were tried and convicted for poisoning a number of people in a way that seemed like hoodoo magic.

That's the story, anyway.

But as any longtime listener of this show knows, the story that's told and the actual truth sometimes take different roads.

It's the deviation between them, that telephone game leading to a gulf of misunderstanding that holds the most powerful lesson of all.

There's a lot we can learn from it, about ourselves, about story, about folklore in general.

But before all of that, There was the truth.

Moreau and Manuel were enslaved men living in what is today the state of Illinois.

In 1779 though, it was still in British hands, although they had only recently acquired the territory from the French, who were the first Europeans to settle the area.

And home for Moreau and Manuel at this point in time was Cahokia.

The two men knew each other from the time they spent enslaved to the same Frenchman, but when he died in 1778, they were both sold off to different estates.

Despite that, though, they still managed to work together.

Manuel manufactured the poisons they sold, and Moreau distributed them to the clients.

It was something they had done for years and had developed a reputation for.

The events of 1779 kicked off when two other enslaved people approached them with a request.

This couple had been suffering through horrible abuse from their slave owners, Monsieur and Madame Nicolle.

The exact request that they had for Moreau and Manuel was to make their mistress gentle.

So, a deal was struck.

But instead of making the Nicolles more gentle, it killed them.

And that's not what the clients had asked for.

And from everything that I've read about their story, it seems that this was the last straw for the others around them.

They had been turning a blind eye to all sorts of similar slip-ups, including prior murders by poison.

So Manuel and Moreau were taken into custody and put on trial.

You know the rest.

Like I said a moment ago, they were executed for their crimes.

And that's when the rumors started.

Because it was really easy for people to hear about two Afro-Caribbean men being put to death for mixing potions and elixirs and walk away thinking that they were witches, even when they weren't.

It probably didn't help that their original sentence was to be burned at the stake.

The judge, a French magistrate, mind you, had simply demanded a cruel enough punishment to match the cruelty of their crimes.

Soon after though, a colonial court stepped in and changed their sentence to death by hanging.

Things got worse a century later, when one historian in Illinois stumbled upon some records about the trial.

He misinterpreted some of the notes on the court documents and published a report on the case with those hot buzzwords of witchcraft and necromancy.

Overnight, the country was introduced to what was said to be Illinois' first and only witchcraft execution, legally sanctioned by the courts no less.

Then everyone bought the story.

Even Theodore Roosevelt fell for it.

In his 1889 book, The Winning of the West, he writes about the case using phrases like trying to bewitch them and burnt and hanged for witchcraft in accordance with the laws and with the decision of the proper court.

To this day, there are people out there who have heard of the trial of Manuel and Moreau, and they've only ever been told that the two men were burned and hanged by the state for being Illinois' first necromancers.

It's a version of history that's clearly a lot more alluring than a story about a couple of poisoners, but it's wrong.

Manuel and Moreau were killers, yes, but their magic was nothing more than chemistry, and their executions were no different from any other murderer of the time.

Lives were lost, and two men were executed for murder.

That's the truth at the heart of the story.

But rumors, it seems, never die.

And as the years have gone on, Illinois began to add names to the list of witches who haunt the state.

Whether based on actual, factual people or conjured out of thin air, these new stories demonstrate the power of rumor to hold on and linger.

And as you're about to find out, they've left us with some terrifying tales to enjoy.

The details about her are sketchy at best.

The people of Williamson County called her Eva Locker and said she lived out on Davis Prairie, or maybe it was David Prairie.

And they first started telling stories about her back in the early 1800s.

One local historian, writing about a century ago, claimed that from 1818 to 1835, there were many great witches in the county, and Eva Locker was chief among them.

And as you might expect, the stories about her have only grown in scope and power over the years.

What was she known for?

Well, she apparently kept a towel hanging on her porch that she could milk like a cow, and when she did, it would magically pull milk from neighboring farms, leaving those farmers with no milk of their own.

They also said that she killed local cattle by shooting them with hairballs.

What sort of weapon fires that kind of ammunition, I have no idea, but the people were convinced.

They would cut open a dead cow and find these hairballs in their stomach.

Of course, these are better known as bezores, and they are incredibly common things.

But sure, blame them on Eva Locker, I guess.

And when she got out of hand, it seems that there was no one else in the county that had the power to stand up to her.

When that happened, it's said that locals went to a preacher named Charlie Lee in the next county over, who had a way of combating Eva's magic.

How?

Well, by shooting a photo of her with a silver bullet in a ceremony that had all the pomp and circumstance of a funeral.

Eva Locker, from what we can tell, might not have been a real person.

Charlie Lee, however, was.

But whether or not his silver bullet worked to cure her victims, well, I think I'll leave it to you to believe whatever you choose.

Then there was Black Annie.

She was known to the locals of Mount Vernon, a small city in southern Illinois, as far back as 1866.

That's when dairy farmers in the area started to notice the figure of a mysterious woman in black hanging around their fields and barns.

And yes, stories that mix witches and cows are pretty common, and for good reason.

When your livelihood depends on your livestock, and especially your cattle, you're bound to project some wild fears onto them.

Those sightings were followed by a panic over milk supplies, leading to Illinois' first, and I quote, dairy war.

And don't ask, I have no idea what that means.

But Annie would return.

On February 19th of 1888, almost 22 years after her first appearance, she was back.

And this time her arrival coincided with something tragic, a tornado.

When the twister was done, it left half of Mount Vernon's population homeless, with 450 buildings totally destroyed and nearly 40 people lost their lives.

So when rumors began to spread that Black Annie, known this time as Cyclone Annie, had been spotted walking through the wreckage in a black dress and matching veil, people panicked.

It didn't help that the flattened building she had been spotted near was the local grade school.

Then, in 1918, a third scare seemed to grip the city.

This time, locals claimed that Black Annie was chasing them through the streets.

Whether they were walking in pairs, riding on horseback, or in a carriage, it didn't matter.

Annie would appear out of nowhere and run after them, her black gown and veil flowing in the warm summer air, something that must have frightened those who experienced it.

And Mount Vernon wasn't alone in their panic.

A figure similar to Black Annie appeared in the Illinois town of Lebanon in 1921, right down to that vintage black dress and veil.

In the 1930s, people in the town of Carlisle reported spotting a woman in a black dress following them from the shadows after dark.

Naturally, people were left terrified by these stories.

And one final note here, Black Annie might not have been a real woman, but the stories are deeply traditional.

It seems that there are similar figures in British folklore that appear in print as far back as the 1600s, and their names?

Black Anice, Black Agnes, Black Anna, and Black Annie, with a Y.

In a lot of ways, her legend is similar to that of La Urona, especially how it became a tool for warning children to behave and not play outside in the dark.

In the end, though, All of them were just rumors.

Yes, the details around them might have been true, the dairy dairy wars and the tornado of 1888, for example, but these legendary witches themselves seem to have only existed on the lips of the locals, not the pages of history.

The only blood in their veins, it seems, was rumor.

But Illinois still has more tales to give up.

And if one event from the 1950s has anything to teach us, it's that rumor can cause people to do terrible things.

Sometimes the wide open landscape of Illinois can become a vacuum that pulls in all sorts of folklore and rumor.

All it takes is a fear, a doubt, or some unexplainable experience to set the event in motion.

And in the winter that spanned 1849 into 1850, that's exactly what happened.

James Speva and his wife Rume lived in McDonough County in western Illinois, along with their seven children.

They owned and farmed a big 40-acre tract of land near Hogwallow Creek, but it wasn't a luxurious existence.

Life was rough, the work was hard, and the rewards were few.

James had a brother William, who owned his own 200 acres nearby, where he lived with his wife Phoebe.

And James's wife Rume had relatives in the area too.

Charles Friend and Abel Friend were farmers just like them, and all of them, the families of James, William, and the Friend brothers all attended church together in the home of Abel and his wife Elizabeth.

Okay, that's the cast of characters, and I know that's a lot to keep track of, but tragedy is rarely built on a simple foundation, and we're going to need most of these players for the events to make sense.

In the winter of 1849, James Spiva came down with a sickness.

He was feeling weak and empty, both of which were making him cranky and frustrated.

It was so bad that he wasn't able to do the farm work that his family depended on for survival.

But that wasn't the only unfortunate turn of events for James.

That same winter, his favorite dog passed away, his cows weren't producing milk like they used to, and some of his other livestock had simply gone missing.

Now, today we might blame that on a number of reasonable causes.

Bad weather, illnesses that cause the animals to wander off and die, that sort of thing.

But this was a deeply isolated area, nearly impassable under huge amounts of snow.

Isolation and fear are a powerful elixir.

But James talked to his brother William about it and the two men came up with an explanation that made sense to them.

James had been bewitched.

The proof was his exhaustion, which both of them believed came from James being transformed into an animal each night and forced to attend a witch's Sabbath.

And who was that witch?

Well, it seemed that the wife of their neighbor, Abel friend, Elizabeth, was also mysteriously exhausted and unwell, so bad that she was confined to her bed.

They decided that she wasn't really sick at all, just resting from all those wild nights at the Sabbath gatherings.

But luckily for James, William was more than just his brother or a farmer.

He was also a witch doctor.

So he had James do something odd.

He instructed him to carve an image of Elizabeth on a tree and then shoot it with a silver bullet.

And James, desperate for relief from his affliction, did exactly that.

The next day, February 23rd of 1850, James was outside chopping wood, something that I assume was a sign that the ritual might have worked, and a neighbor passed by and mentioned the local gossip.

Elizabeth Friend had passed away that very morning.

Oh, I knew that, James replied.

I killed her.

She was a witch, and I shot her with a silver bullet.

And as you might imagine, hearing someone confess to murder so readily inspired this neighbor to run straight to the authorities.

I doubt they believe the witchcraft part, but the actual confession, that was pretty damning.

As a result, a few days later, James Speva was arrested for the murder of Elizabeth Friend.

Clearly, when he stood before a justice on April 4th, James explained the misunderstanding and everyone laughed it off.

Right?

Well, not exactly.

James apparently stuck to his wild story, so Justice Tridwell officially charged him with murder.

He was immediately sentenced to be hanged, although that seems to have been altered shortly after.

Death by firearm, a death similar to his claimed killing of Elizabeth, was his new punishment, according according to old court documents right down to being lined up against a tree as the story goes however as James was being placed against that tree a lawyer happened to be passing by and asked Justice Tridwell what was going on then he informed the judge that since James was not a Christian the more just thing to do would be to let him go home and prepare to meet God while James was at home though it seems the sheriff had a change of heart and the execution never took place soon enough the matter was forgotten and James went back to life on the farm.

Crisis averted the end.

Right?

Sort of.

That is until 1855, when James felt that he had once again been bewitched by someone near him.

Elizabeth Friend was dead though, so who was his new enemy?

Once again he asked his brother William and once again William had a suspect.

It was James' own wife, Rumé.

At this point, one of the brothers remembered a bit of old witch folklore.

It was said that you could break a witch's spell by scratching her face and drawing blood.

So William suggested that James wait until his wife was sleeping and then give her a little cut on the forehead with a knife.

Heck she might not even notice, he told him.

So that's what James did.

Fueled by fear and empowered by folklore, he crept toward his sleeping wife and placed the knife against her face.

But Rumé felt it and suddenly sat up, causing the blade to cut a deep gash down the length of her cheek.

It was enough to cause her to go to the authorities and accuse James of murder.

He was even arrested and put on trial, spending time in the county jail, but in the end, he was found not guilty.

Upon his release, James apparently skipped town, moving as far away as possible.

Three years later, Rume filed for divorce.

She was thankfully able to move on from such a troubled and paranoid man, but she would carry the scar on her face for the rest of her life, a living reminder of the dangerous power of rumor.

Don't believe everything you read on the internet.

For anyone growing up in the 90s, as the online world became the new frontier, that was the common warning from parents and friends.

Just because it was typed out on a page or a screen didn't necessarily make it true.

That tendency, though, to believe anything sensational enough to cause people to skip over the due diligence of basic research and fact-checking wasn't new to the 90s.

It's still with us today and we can also find it plastered across the pages of history.

Rumors have always been more appealing than the truth and far more viral.

But here's a truth that's wild enough to be worthy of spreading around at parties and on social media.

Witchcraft is still technically illegal in Illinois and is punishable by death.

How is that possible?

Well, it has to do with those old world connections in the pre-United States version of Illinois.

Back in February of 1819, the Illinois state legislature wanted to make sure that all state laws were built on the same foundation as the original 13 colonies, a principle known as English common law.

It was smart in a way, ensuring that all the laws of one state didn't stand in direct opposition to the laws of another.

But it also meant inheriting the flaws that came with it.

Flaws like the the 1604 Witchcraft Act.

Now, England repealed the act in 1736, but Illinois has never formally done the same.

In fact, in 1874, they passed the same law all over again, just with some new formatting and clarification.

But the felony charge connected to witchcraft made it through the revision, and it's still on the books today.

Thankfully, though, it's never been enforced.

Should any of the Illinois witches that we talked about today have actually been real, they might have found themselves in some legal hot water.

And so might another pair of families.

You see, in 1837, another pair moved to Illinois, all the way from New England.

Brothers Avery and Moses settled in Warren Township and began new lives in the growing area.

And a few years later, in 1842, another man, also from New England, did the same thing, moving in just a few miles down the road from the brothers.

Both households not only came from the same region, but the same state, Massachusetts, and their connection, unbeknownst to them, ran much deeper than a few miles of Illinois roadway.

You see, back in 1692, Moses and Avery's great-great-great-grandmother, Mary Estee, was hanged on Gallows Hill as part of the Salem witch trials.

One of Mary Estee's primary accusers, by the way, was a young Ann Putnam Jr.

It was her testimony that helped justify Mary's execution.

Although she did later write a letter to the church back in 1706 apologizing for her role in the tragedy.

I know because I've actually held that letter in my own hands, but it didn't change the cold hard fact that the Putnam name helped destroy the Esti name, which makes it all the more awkward as well as wildly coincidental that the Esti brothers' new neighbor in Illinois would also hail from the same area of Massachusetts, a man named Proctor Putnam, the great-great-great-nephew of Anne Putnam.

If you're like me, you were probably a little surprised to hear rumors of witch trials and sorcery so far from the colonial region of the eastern seaboard.

As an Illinois boy myself, I was honestly not expecting it, but here we are, rumors and all.

But as amazing as that might be, I haven't even told you all the tales we found.

In fact, there's one more that needs exploring.

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It's often the newspaper headline that helps give birth to the rumor, isn't it?

This one, from the New York Times, no less, seemed to sum everything up.

It read, A couple of frisky young females.

But rather than being an article about some pair of socially mobile new money kids kids causing a stink in high society, this article was about something taking place way out in Illinois.

In fact, this story, one that seemed to enthrall big city readers everywhere, took place on a farm.

The Williams family lived in Franklin County, down in the southern tip of the state.

In fact, the community they lived in was known as Fitz Hill, which might have been a bit of foreshadowing, as you're about to find out.

And it all began on April 1st of 1871.

That was the day both of James Williams' daughters began acting strangely.

True to the way the press worked back then, the girls, 16 and 18 years old at the time, are never actually named, so we don't know their full true identity.

But what they did that spring certainly made them a household name.

It would begin the same way each evening.

After a completely normal day of working, talking, laughing, and more, their behavior would change as the sun dipped below the horizon.

All at once, both girls would drop everything they were doing and break into an an all-out run in a straight line away from the family home.

When they reappeared minutes later, they would both bound and leap up onto the roof of the house where they performed all sorts of dangerous, complex acrobatics along the roofline.

The only things interrupting this odd behavior were their unnatural screams that they bellowed out as they did it, and of course, their fits.

According to multiple witnesses, the girls would be balancing along the very peak of the roof when all of a sudden, they would be struck with violent seizures, again, at the exact same time.

Sometimes these fits would cause them to go perfectly still, like statues, and yet not fall off or lose their balance.

You know how communities can be too?

The moment word began to spread about the unusual feats of these two sisters, folks began to walk over and watch them.

or travel by horse, even by carriage.

Soon, there were regular crowds of over 200 people, all entranced by the supernatural acrobatics of the William sisters.

On top of all of that, pun maybe partially intended here here if I'm honest, the sisters began to do other things too.

They spoke in a language that no one else could understand.

They had a habit of capturing flies and eating them live out of their hands, sometimes to the point that it caused them to vomit.

And their movements, even on the ground, had a choreographed quality as if they were both just puppets controlled by the same invisible master.

Now, I know what you're thinking.

How long did it take for someone to accuse them of being witches, right?

But that's not what happened.

Instead, these young ladies turned that idea around and claimed that it was they who had been bewitched.

Their initial sprint each evening, they claimed, was the doing of the witch who tormented them, causing them to run to her house each evening.

That June, the girls claimed, in the daytime when they could speak freely, that they were being tortured by a local woman who was an evil witch, but they were unable to speak her name.

According to them, if they were to identify this witch to the authorities, she would choke them and cause more fits.

There's no record of what ultimately happened to the Williams sisters, which is more than a little frustrating.

Their story was covered in all sorts of far-off newspapers, but the opinions were rather mixed.

Up in Chicago, for example, the Chicago Tribune called it a good old-fashioned case of witchcraft.

But elsewhere, such as Tennessee, there were doubts, like when the Nashville Union and American blamed their behavior on, and I quote, some villainous quack doctor.

The best guess as to their true identity, according to the work of researcher and author Michael Kleene, is that their names were Mary and Susan.

But no one is really sure.

To this day, their story remains a mystery, wrapped in folklore and fueled by rumor.

This episode of Lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with research by Cassandra De Alba and Taylor Hagerdorn, and music by Chad Lawson.

Lore is much more than just a podcast.

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