Lore 226: Grounded

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People often talk about wanting to leave their mark on the world.

Most of us achieve that in some small way.

The stories that others might tell about us, the good moments and joy we helped others experience, maybe a habit or tradition that will get carried on in our family for generations to come.

Others, though, have made bigger marks.

For example, it's honestly pretty difficult to imagine a world without the iPhone.

Steve Jobs might not be with us today, but there are billions of examples out there that his vision impacted the world.

Then there's Leo Bakeland, who invented a material in 1907 that he called Bakelite, kicking off the modern plastics industry that surrounds us today.

Or John J.

Loud, who patented a writing tool in 1888 that has become something all of us take for granted today, the ballpoint pen.

But there are also darker marks.

Take the legend of Colonel Jonathan Buck, for example.

He was born in Massachusetts back in 1719, but later in life he helped establish a number of settlements farther north in territory that later became the state of Maine.

And toward the end of his life, one of those settlements was renamed after him, Bucksport.

Not a bad way to leave your mark on a place.

Before he passed away in 1795, though, it's rumored that he oversaw the burning of a local woman woman who had been labeled a witch.

She professed her innocence, though, and claimed that once the Colonel was dead, she would place her mark on his grave.

Then, as the flames consumed her, it's said that one of her charred legs broke off and fell out of the fire.

Half a century later, the Colonel's descendants finally erected a stone monument in his honor.

And do you know what appeared on the surface of that stone shortly after?

The shadowy form of an eerie object.

The lower part of a human leg.

The dark tales that we tell have a way of sticking around, making a mark on our language, beliefs, and traditions.

Stories fuel our fear, they guide our decisions, and they give our faith a foundation.

Most of them might be invisible, but a few are still there, ready to be examined by the naked eye.

Because sometimes the folklore that surrounds us is literally etched in stone.

I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore.

She was the goddess of healing and motherhood to the ancient Egyptians.

They saw her as the divine mother of the Pharaoh and called on her for help when they needed healing.

Isis.

And if Herodotus was correct, Isis left her footprints all over the ancient world.

Literally.

For example, in the little Greek village of Marinea, people for thousands of years have revered a large oval-sized footprint that's thought to be hers.

And she's not alone.

There's a rock beside a river in the region that was once known as Scythia, along the northern shore of the Black Sea, that's supposed to have a footprint from Heracles, the Greek version of Hercules.

And right beside it is another smaller print.

This one they say was created by Dionysus.

There's a technical term for features like this, if you're curious.

Geologists call them petrosomatographs, and they are almost always images of body parts embedded in stone.

Some examples are very clearly carved by human hands, while others just thought to be natural shapes that folks have pushed their own vision onto.

Either way, these shapes have taken on a lot of significance over the years.

One of the biggest examples are the footprints of Jesus.

They are said to be the last steps that he ever took on earth before his ascension into heaven.

Today, the right footprint can be found at the Chapel of the Ascension on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, and the left has been removed and taken to be kept at the mosque on the Temple Mount.

But Jesus isn't the only one leaving tracks for us to follow.

Legends say that the footprints found in a cave in Monte Gargano, Italy, were left by none other than the Archangel Michael.

In Ireland, there are depressions in a number of stones that are rumored to be left by various saints like saint patrick who created them when they knelt to pray some folks even believe that water collected in those depressions has healing properties outside the world of christianity the belief is just as strong In Islamic tradition, the Prophet Muhammad left behind a number of footprints of his own.

There's a long-standing belief that wherever his feet touched stone, impressions were left behind.

One of those prints is located within the dome of the rock in Jerusalem, but there are others too, in places like Cairo and Istanbul.

And it's really fascinating to think about the magic of these features.

I can almost feel the cold rock, with those edges worn smooth by centuries of hands and feet that have been rubbed over them, like a sculpture in reverse almost, but with so much more power and significance, and because of the stories attached to them.

Of course, there are others too.

There are footprints all over Asia that are associated with the Buddha, known traditionally as Buddhapada.

To be fair, a good number of them are man-made, sometimes decorated with a Dharma wheel in the center of the soul.

Some of them bear inscriptions, and many are painted.

Within Hinduism, there are revered footprints that have said to have been created by Vishnu, Shiva, Rama, and Krishna.

And across the world in North America, the indigenous people of South Dakota have their own sacred image in stone.

And although it's in a museum today to keep it safe from vandalism, it once sat out under the sun for all to see.

It's called Medicine Rock and measures 16 feet long by 8 feet wide.

To a geologist, it's just a 40-ton piece of granite, but the Sioux tells stories of how the print that's visible on it was put there by the Great Spirit.

At the very least, it was carved or refined by someone who clearly wanted to attach a physical sign to a spiritual truth, and the stories have stuck around ever since.

So there you have it, a grand tour of the world with our eyes pointed downward, checking the rocks for the telltale signs of the divine.

And you have to admit that there's something powerful about seeing the shape of a hand or a foot in a material as ancient and permanent as stone.

It's no wonder that so many of them have attracted such a rich tapestry of folklore to go along with them.

But not all of the stories are those of reverence and devotion.

In fact, there are some rocky footprints out there that hint at a darker world.

They always come with tales of shadows and danger and are thought to be physical proof of the father of all evil, the footprints of the devil.

It wasn't supposed to be his type of hangout space.

Honestly, when we think of the devil, we rarely imagine him inside a house of God.

But according to the legend, that's exactly what happened.

It all started in Munich, Germany, back in 1468, with the construction of the Frauenkirke, a sort of modern nickname for a late Gothic church called the Cathedral of Our Dear Lady.

That was the year the architect, Jorg von Halsbach, realized that his vision and the city's budget weren't necessarily aligned.

And as the story goes, he accepted a loan from a very unlikely party.

In some ways, it's that age-old deal with the devil sort of folklore.

Desperate old von Halsbach took the devil's money, but it came with strings.

The cathedral had to be dark, with no windows to speak of.

He is the Lord of Darkness after all, right?

And von Halsbach seemed to comply.

So when the church was finished, the devil asked him for a tour, which seemed to be going fine until he stepped around one of the massive columns, only to discover windows, almost as if they'd been hidden by the architecture.

And wouldn't you know it, the devil lost his mind and stomped on the floor so hard that he left a blackened footprint behind.

Far from Germany, on the other side of the Atlantic, one North Carolina community has their own version of the devil's footprint in stone.

Bath is actually the oldest incorporated town in the entire state, having been established back in 1705.

And for a while, it was legendary for playing host to an entirely different devil, the infamous pirate Blackbeard.

In 1765, a popular Great Awakening preacher passed through.

It's said that he was so thoroughly unimpressed with bath that he actually took off his shoes and shook the dust from them, a symbolic act meant to curse a community, which is the reason why some believe that things there took a turn for the worse in 1813.

That was the year that Jesse Elliott made the mistake one Sunday morning of skipping church in favor of throwing a saddle over his favorite horse and then riding him up and down the streets of town.

More than a few folks will tell you that Jesse had been drinking too, which didn't help his reputation.

And it might explain what happened next.

A stranger rode into town, all dressed in black, and pulled up alongside Jesse.

The stranger then bet the drunk young man that he could beat him in a race.

Jesse's judgment was already suspect, so you won't be surprised to hear that he agreed to the stranger's challenge, and soon enough, they were off.

For the first few heartbeats, Jesse was in the lead, but perhaps out of arrogance or maybe out of fear, he shouted out a pledge, take me in a winner or or take me to hell.

And that seems to be all the devil really needed.

Jesse's horse made a sudden and complete stop, sending Jesse flying off the saddle.

Like a bullet, he collided with a nearby tree and was instantly killed.

The mysterious dark rider, whom everyone knew to be the devil, steered his horse over to Jesse's lifeless corpse and stared at it for a moment.

And then, as quick as he had arrived, He was gone.

Now, a lot of stories have popped up over the years concerning that tragic event.

Some say that you can still see bits of Jesse's hair on the stump of the original tree.

Others claim that they've seen Jesse's ghost hovering around at the scene of his death, but most of the tales center on the hoof prints.

In some tales, they belong to Jesse's horse, but others think they were created by the devil.

They are described as round depressions in the rock, around five inches deep and up to 10 inches wide.

And the biggest clue that they were formed by the devil, animals refuse to eat any food that rests inside them.

One last story.

Back across the Atlantic in the southwestern part of England is the county of Devon.

It's one of the more sparsely populated areas of the country, pretty rural in comparison to most others.

But for a while back in the winter of 1855, it felt far too crowded.

It started one night in February of that year.

Snow had been falling off and on since January and the world seemed covered in white.

In fact, it would continue to snow well into March and many of the rivers across the countryside would also freeze.

Folks, as you can imagine, were getting a bit stir-crazy inside.

But on February 9th, people stepped outside to feed their animals and discovered hoof prints all over their properties.

After investigating them, two unusual things were discovered.

First, the tracks continued up walls and over roofs, sometimes even leaping over tall haystacks.

And second, they were in pairs like a human.

In other words, they were made by a creature with two legs and hooves.

And yes, I'm cheating here.

These were temporary footprints left in the snow rather than in stone, which means that we can't stand over them and examine their contours today.

But for the people in Devon back in 1855, they were as good as, and their appearance sparked a panic.

Farmers everywhere began to follow the tracks.

One man claimed to have even found strange white objects about the size of grapes that they assumed were the devil's droppings.

And many of the prints were cloven, just one more detail adding to the overall belief that the devil was to blame.

Pretty soon, the entire countryside was convinced that Satan himself had paid them a visit.

Folks were so convinced that this was the truth that one local minister, Rev.

G.

M.

Musgrave, preached to his congregation that it was simply an escaped kangaroo.

An explanation that he himself did not actually believe, mind you.

He just preferred it to the idea that the devil had been allowed to show up on his watch.

In the end, no one could offer an answer to the riddle, and as spring melted the snow, any last bits of evidence slowly faded away.

Today, all that's left are the stories, memories of a fear that gripped the country, and reminders of what it is we truly dread, that the devil might walk among us.

Most stories aren't as powerful without context.

It's a mantra I've repeated here over and over, and it's never not true.

Context adds depth to the stories we remember.

So before we talk about what George did, I first need to explain who George was.

George Whitfield was born long before the British colonies became America, way back in 1714.

Born in Gloucester, England, and trained at the University of Oxford, he was smart and driven.

Some historians even described him as handsome, complete with a nice powder white wig.

Now his early studies might have been in theater, but those were soon replaced by theology, and that background in stagecraft tagged along for the ride, influencing the way that George preached his sermons.

There was none of that deadpan reading from the page style for him.

No, he was out there with no notes, moving all over the place.

Think televangelist preacher meets young George Washington.

Oh, and remember that great awakening preacher that I mentioned earlier who cursed the town of Bath in North Carolina?

Yeah, that was George Whitfield.

And all of this made him very popular.

How popular, you might be asking?

Well, on October 12th of 1740, he preached a sermon at Boston Commons, the city's massive outdoor common space, that drew a crowd of over 23,000 people.

Most scholars think that it was the single largest gathering in American history up to that point.

So yeah, George Whitfield was popular.

And the point where he intersects our journey through folklore today actually took place just a couple of weeks before that massive Boston Commons Sermon.

Because on September 30th of 1740, George did something absolutely unbelievable.

It happened in the town of Ipswich, a little ways up the coast north of Boston.

Fun fact, Ipswich has around 60 first period homes still standing.

These are houses built prior to 1725, mind you, which is the most of any town in the country.

Standing on High Street there can almost make you feel like you've taken a time machine back to colonial New England.

That October day in 1740 though, everyone was over at First Church to hear George Whitfield preach.

Thousands gathered to watch him deliver his sermon, standing in front of a massive curved mirror that decorated the space behind the pulpit.

Apparently there was already a lot of local folklore about that mirror, with people whispering that the devil would often hide behind it to glare at the folks who attended church.

George, though, either didn't know about these rumors or he just didn't care.

But as he dove deeper into his fiery message, people claimed that his words were so pure and holy that they angered the devil, which lured him out.

In an instant, the Lord of Darkness crashed into George, who quickly caught hold of the monster and tossed him to the floor.

What ensued was a battle for the ages.

George Whitfield and the devil rolled around and around on the floor of the church, wrestling with each other in front of a horrified audience.

But soon enough, their battle took them out the front doors and onto the lawn outside.

And that was where the most dramatic moment took place.

Their supernatural wrestling match actually took them up the side of the church until minutes later they found themselves battling it out on the roof.

There was this tense moment when the devil had poor old George pinned against the steeple, ready to finish him off, when the preacher was said to have unleashed the most pious and holy stream of words.

Satan was literally blown away, knocked clean off the roof to the ground below.

But like a cat, the devil always seems to land on his feet.

And as he did, he slammed onto a rock, leaving behind an enormous footprint.

The devil instantly ran away, and George found his way back down to the waiting congregation, where I would assume he apologized for the interruption and basically said, So, where was I?

George didn't apparently think much about the day's events though, since his own journal doesn't mention the cosmic battle that took place.

But it's a story that's been repeated for centuries.

It's a popular tale, and one that's perfectly designed to explain the very real, very visible dark dark print on the stone.

And I get it, it's easy to hear stories like this and dismiss them wholesale.

They don't sound possible, and a lot of us just read them as fantastical additions to an otherwise mundane day at church.

But the fact that we're still talking about it, whether it is true or not, is at least proof of one thing:

some folklore will always stick around, like footprints, frozen in time.

It's hard to overstate the power of visual evidence.

Seeing is believing, after all, and we certainly do love being able to point at something and declare that it's proof of our beliefs.

The Shroud of Turin, the grave of King Arthur in Glastonbury, there's a whole world of relics that point towards story.

And And that's why it shouldn't be a surprise that there are so many mysterious foot-shaped markings throughout the world that people have associated with legendary figures like the devil.

We want to see proof of the things we believe in, and just like finding a cloud in the sky that looks like a puppy, if we look long enough, we're bound to find what we seek.

And that's the truth at the center of all the stone footprint folklore.

Sometimes these prints have looked so human that we've had to go looking for stories to explain their unlikely appearance.

What better way to make a story seem more real and more grounded than to give it something that we can point to while we talk about it?

For George Whitfield, though, like so many other footprints in stone, the real story is actually found in science.

The devil's footprint in Ipswich is actually what geologists call a xenolith.

It's the remains of a darker stone that fell into a pool of molten rock, like dark pieces of chocolate in a lighter colored cookie.

The fact that it looks like a footprint to us is just an added bonus.

And as for George, his reputation only grew as he got older.

His career took him all over, yes, even to Bath, North Carolina.

But the final moments of his life would bring him back to the area around Ipswich, where he wrestled the devil on the roof of that church.

He died in September of 1770 at the age of 55 in the nearby city of Newburyport.

But his story didn't end there.

Five years later, in 1755, two military officials were passing through Newburyport and decided to see the famous dead preacher for themselves.

They broke into his tomb, opened his casket, and even took some souvenirs, his clerical collar and wristbands.

And those relics made their way onto the battlefield during the Revolutionary War, seen by many of the God-fearing New England soldiers as a bit of good luck.

But if there was anything close to a curse for violating Whitfield's grave, we know it followed at least one of those two original thieves.

Because in 1781, the dead preacher himself showed up to remind him of it.

This military guy, by the way, had started on the side of the colonists, but within a few years had defected and joined the enemy in their fight.

And as the story goes, he was standing outside along with an entire British regiment when the ghost of George Whitfield appeared over them.

It's said that the men were so frightened by the experience that they burned anything that identified them as British.

George Whitfield after that became a symbol of God's favor for the colonial cause, and that grave-robbing Revolutionary War turncoat went on to be known as America's most infamous traitor, Benedict Arnold.

The legends and tales that we've whispered throughout the ages have a way of surrounding us.

They seem to be everywhere, littered throughout our cultures and traditions.

And in some instances, as we have seen today, they are even visible.

But not all stories of mysterious figures dancing and fighting in front of witnesses had to do with the devil.

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Back in North Carolina, there is more to see than the stump of the tree where Jesse Elliott died in front of the devil and the hoof print in the rock nearby.

In the southwestern part of the state, there's another rock that needs to be seen, only this one is much larger.

It's known as Chimney Rock, a massive 315-foot granite outcropping that rises above the surrounding woodland.

Today it's part of Chimney Rock State Park, located in, you guessed it, the village of Chimney Rock.

Clearly, it's important to a lot of people.

And one reason why is a series of events that took place back in the summer of 1806.

On July 31st, an eight-year-old girl named Elizabeth Reeves came home and told her brother that she had just spotted a man standing on top of Chimney Rock, a place that the local indigenous people had long pointed at as the home of a mysterious little people.

So her brother, 11-year-old Morgan, followed her into the woods to see for himself.

But there wasn't a man standing on top of the rock.

There were thousands.

They were in all shapes and sizes, from infants to adults, men and women, some standing and some actually flying over the outcropping.

And according to the Reeves children, these figures all seemed to glow with a brilliant light.

The kids did what I think any reasonable person would have done in their shoes.

They screamed.

Hearing what sounded like distress, their older sister Polly and their mother Patsy, along with a few others, all headed out to see what had happened.

One of those witnesses was a neighbor named Robert Searcy, who later spoke to a local newspaper reporter.

The article described, ⁇ ...a very numerous crowd of beings resembling the human species.

It then went on to explain how they were all clad with brilliant white rainment, but he could not describe any form of their garment.

They appeared to rise off the mountain south of said rock and about as high and collected about the top of Chimney Rock.

And here's the thing, this evening of angelic beings who flew and shimmered all around Chimney Rock, it wasn't the last unusual thing to happen there.

Just five years later, in 1811, more unexplainable phenomena took place, this time in a slightly different shape.

Witnesses claimed that a whole host of angelic warriors gathered in the sky above Chimney Rock, cosmic soldiers mounted on horseback.

In fact, it seems that there were two distinct forces and they were slowly moving toward each other as if battle were about to begin.

And this took place more than once.

The first evening drew a handful of witnesses, but over the following four days, more and more people gathered to watch the battle unfold.

Each evening, the angelic armies drew a little bit closer than the day before, until finally on the fifth night, they collided in the sky.

According to those who watched it, the two armies fought each other for over 10 minutes.

All of the expected sounds of battle, the clashing of swords against shield, the screams of pain from the wounded, the cries of charge or retreat, all of it could be heard down below, among the locals who had gathered to watch.

And then, both glowing armies vanished, leaving Chimney Rock in darkness.

As you might imagine, the people who witnessed these incredible events were curious, and so they formed a delegation delegation to travel up to the top of the outcropping and look for evidence of battle.

But as far as the stories tell us, they only found exactly what you and I might expect:

absolutely nothing.

This This episode of lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with research by Cassandra Dayalba and music by Chad Lawson.

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