Episode 187: The Crucible

This is the story of the one.

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There's nothing like a good old-fashioned fairy tale, isn't there?

It's one of the things that unites us.

No matter where you're from or what culture you were raised in, we were all born into communities that told traditional stories.

Many of the most commonly told ones are the ones that have found a foothold in popular culture.

Cinderella, Snow White, the Little Mermaid.

A lot of them are bright and cheerful too, or at least work their way in that direction.

But some, of course, are darker.

Little Red Riding Hood, for example, in its original form, is a pretty gruesome tale, including the grandmother's blood and flesh being served to the little girl by the wolf in disguise, and then she eats it.

And then there's Hansel and Gretel, the story of a boy and girl who are abandoned in the woods by their parents, only to wind up lured to a cottage made of sweets and cakes.

And of course, we all know how that one ends, right?

Soon enough, they find themselves in the clutches of the old woman who lives there, a witch who sustains herself by fattening up little children, and then cooking them in in her oven.

It's like Candyland meets saw with a touch of Disney magic.

And it's a story we tell to teach an important lesson.

Be careful around strangers.

And as our world has more and more become a dangerous place to live, it's a fairy tale that still seems to hold on to a lot of its relevance.

Of course, most of us were raised to see the fantasy in a story like that.

A witch who murders, cooks, and eats other people.

Honestly, how much more fictional could we get?

But it never hurts to push back against assumptions and ask the difficult question, what if it could actually happen?

I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is lore.

Leonarda was born in the Crucible.

Her mother, Amelia, had been a young socialite with a shot at climbing the ladder, but when she was assaulted by a local drunk and left pregnant with his child, those hopes came crashing down.

Making matters worse, Amelia's parents forced her to marry the drunk, leaving Leonarda to be raised in a household that didn't want her, for a wide assortment of reasons.

That was the crucible, the blast furnace that forged her in those early years, and it was rough, to say the least.

Compounding all this pain was her mother's deep desire to give Leonarda the life she never had.

She took meetings with eligible men from all across their little town of Montella in southwestern Italy, looking for the match that would give Leonarda and their family by proxy a desperately needed boost.

But Leonarda had a different plan in mind.

In 1917, at the age of 22, she met a man and fell in love.

But he wasn't one of her mother's choices.

Heck, he wasn't even on the list.

He was just a lowly town clerk named Rafael Pensardi, a man with no future or promise of something more.

But he was the love of her life, and that's all that mattered to her.

And so, for the first time in her young life, Leonarda pushed back against her mother's wishes and married Rafael in a small, rushed ceremony.

Her mother went mad over the ordeal, and when Leonarda came home to collect her belongings, Amelia did something most mothers would never consider.

No, she didn't beat her daughter or attack her with a barrage of insults.

She cursed her her and her new marriage.

Faced with that sort of threat, the young couple packed up and left, heading a bit south to the seaside town of Lauria, which is where, weeks later, a down on her luck, still new to town, Leonarda attended a traveling fair and met a Romani fortune teller.

It was her chance to finally see if her mother's curse had any power or if it was even real.

No, the fortune teller told her, she wasn't going to die, but she would outlive her children.

And as the following years show us, that definitely must have felt like it was coming true.

Countless painful, traumatic miscarriages seemed to drive that message home.

But in 1922, she and Raphael gave birth to their first son, Giuseppe, and he became her obsession, keeping him at home through his early years rather than letting him out of her sight to play outside.

Other children followed, but between 1922 and 1927, each of them became sick and died before the age of three.

All she had left was Giuseppe.

In 1927, she did something desperate.

Working the overnight in a bank as a cleaner had given her access to the account register, and she took a gamble and made some adjustments, instantly turning herself into a wealthy woman.

Sadly, she was almost immediately caught, and as punishment for her crimes, she was thrown in jail for a year and a half.

When she was released, she and Raphael agreed that moving to a new town might give them the best chance at a fresh start, so they packed up their family and headed inland to the small community of La Cedonia.

That fresh start didn't happen, though.

First, there was another encounter with a Romani fortune-teller, who informed Leonardo of two possible futures for herself, prison or a mental asylum.

It sent her into an emotional spiral, and her days and nights were filled with a deepened depression.

And a short time after that, all of her mental turmoil was greeted by something far more physical, when a massive earthquake ripped through the region, leveling the town and destroying structures in a 2,400-square-mile radius.

And that included Leonardo's new home, all their possessions, and the new life they had tried to build.

So she packed up the family and headed north, broken and tired, eager to build the new life she had been hoping for.

But looking back, she would end up building something else instead.

Life in Coreggio wasn't what she was expecting.

For years, Leonarda's superstitions made her a bit of an outsider.

She was used to sitting on the sidelines, being ignored, or receiving a bit of that old-fashioned side-eye from the people around her.

But here, she began to flourish.

During those first few years, things really did start to look up.

Her son Giuseppe had four younger siblings who managed to survive early childhood and Raphael found a good job.

And Leonarda?

Well, she set up a soap-making store and started to make friends.

And soon enough, that circle had grown quite large.

Then something strange happened.

People started asking her for her advice.

It was as if a switch had been flipped inside her, turning on her natural leadership qualities.

According to the story, as Leonarda herself told it years later, she had even graduated from giving advice to hosting dinner parties.

And it was at one of them, she said, after long hours of eating and drinking in the front room of her soap shop that she let slip that she had experience with fortune-telling.

At their request, she read all of their poems, made predictions, and over time, wowed them with the accuracy of it all.

It was all the encouragement she needed to dive deeper into the world of the occult.

Leonarda soon became a fetichiera, a fixer, known in the community for the charm bag she made and sold, along with the fortunes that she told for those who were interested.

Before she knew it, just about every person who had any sort of influence in the community was coming to her for guidance.

Life was looking up, and for a little while, it might have even seemed like the darkness of those old curses, the promise of a future either inside a prison or an asylum, had even faded away.

But the rumblings of war in 1939 brought it all back.

Hitler was on the move, nations were picking sides, and the men of Italy were signing up for military service service for a conflict that they knew was coming.

Much to her horror, though, her oldest and most precious child, Giuseppe, told her that he too wanted to fight and that he planned to enlist.

In an instant, her perfect world crumbled again.

Her reaction, according to her own retelling later, was to lean harder into the occult.

If a curse could have damned her early in life, then she would simply master the dark arts and fight back.

But to do something so bold, so big, required more than charms.

In fact, it called for something darker than anything she had done before.

It required human sacrifice.

Leonarda explained that her first victim was easy.

Faustina Seti was an old spinster who hadn't given up hope of finding a loving husband.

Leonarda lured her to the house with the promise of setting her up with a man she knew.

As they talked, the two women drank wine and laughed about the future.

But Seti's wine was drugged.

That's when Leonarda claims she took an axe and killed Seti, and then cut her body into pieces.

After dissolving those pieces with caustic soda, she poured the liquefied remains into a nearby septic tank.

But there was still a lot of blood to manage.

That she poured into some baking pans and used heat to dry it until it crumbled like flour.

Then she added it to a few other ingredients like sugar, chocolates, milk, and eggs and mixed it all into tea cakes.

cakes that she served her guests for days to come.

Her second victim, Francesca Salvi, was promised a teaching job that conveniently required her to travel abroad.

But after a glass of laced wine, she too fell to pieces before Leonarda's axe.

But this time, rather than rendering down her flesh into a slush that she could dispose of, she boiled it down until she had the ingredients for soap.

Soap that she sold in her shop and gave as a gift to friends and neighbors.

And with each new murder, Leonarda stole every penny these women possessed.

Soon, her pocketbook was thick with cash and her dark plans, whatever they entailed, had been filled with power.

The way she told it, the world hadn't seen a witch like her in generations.

She was something old and powerful in a society that had forgotten the dangers of the dark side.

She was crafting something terrifying, and the world was about to get a taste.

It's important to note that it wasn't odd for people to disappear in those days.

The war had frightened many people and a lot of folks were looking for a safer life elsewhere.

So when her first two victims vanished, no one seemed to think twice about it.

It was the third missing person that did her in, though.

Virginia Cachoppo was a former opera singer looking for a way to return to the entertainment world and Leonarda claimed that she had a solution, so the pair met up in 1941.

After a nice glass of drugged wine and some quality time with the axe, the former fortune teller claims that she cut Virginia's body into pieces and went through all of the steps again.

Her fat became soap and her life savings became Leonarda's.

But it turns out this victim had a family and they started started to worry when she didn't come home.

Witnesses eventually pointed the authorities to Leonarda's house where they found enough evidence to arrest her, including some bones and all the cash she had been stealing.

But they also did something that horrified Leonarda.

They took her son into custody as well.

All that effort to keep Giuseppe safe, to coddle him and protect him from the dangers of the world and her mother's curse.

And here he was, following her to jail.

All her carefully laid plans had come crashing down, and there was no way to stop it.

Well, almost no way.

It turns out she and her son had quite the long wait before their trial.

Five years, in fact, and Leonarda used that time to write a massive, 750-page autobiography.

Everything I've told you up to this point, from her mother's curse to the elaborate ways that she dispatched her victims, all of it comes from that book.

And the question is, how much of it was real?

Clearly, motherhood had not been easy for her.

According to the court documents, she had had to bury at least 10 children over the years, which explained why she obsessed over the ones that survived, and her victims had clearly been killed.

But sprinkled onto those truths was a healthy dose of herbs and spices of her own invention.

When the trial kicked off, the court-appointed psychiatrist who was working on the case gave Leonarda the opportunity to share her side of the story, so she handed him her memoir, and he took every claim inside inside it as the gospel truth.

If she said she was a witch and that her occult powers allowed her to do those things, that was the fact.

Apparently, the general public agreed.

Newspapers carried her story and people were both fascinated and disgusted by what they read.

One paper reported that a local doctor swore her body was covered in long, bristly hair, making her out to be some sort of monster or creature from a dark fairy tale.

And sales of those newspapers soared.

All the while, she professed her guilt.

She did all the things she claimed.

She was a powerful witch and she should be punished for her deeds.

Only me and God know what happened, she cried out to the courtroom.

I would like to cut off my hands and gouge out my eyes, grease me with petrol, set me on fire, let me be lynched by the crowd, but let my son out.

who is innocent.

Her devotion to Giuseppe was never in doubt, but the truth of her claims, the powers of her magic and the evil things that she did with her victims certainly was.

And much of the 15-day-long trial focused on that because there were a lot of inconsistencies.

When she detailed her recipe for soap or described how much caustic soda was needed to dissolve a human body, experts noticed her numbers were wildly off.

And if you read more than the hundreds of English-language articles written about her over the years and go straight to the Italian court records, a different picture emerges.

She wanted them to believe she was a witch, that she was insane, that she needed to be locked up and never set free, and most importantly, that she acted alone without her precious Giuseppe's help.

It was madness, her madness, and nothing more.

For the prosecution, though, it ultimately came down to the cash she had hidden away, taken from her victims.

However she killed them and however she disposed of their bodies, the unmistakable truth was that she had planned ahead and had enough mental clarity and sanity to carry it out.

It was an obvious case of premeditated murder and theft, and of that crime, she was clearly guilty.

When the judge stood up to read the verdict, the courtroom fell silent.

Leonardo was reportedly calm and emotionless, while Giuseppe was ghostly white.

It took four minutes to read the charges and the final decision.

Leonarda Canciuli, the soap maker witch of Coreggio, was sentenced to 30 years for her crime.

Her son, though, the man she had protected since he was born, was acquitted of all charges, exactly what she had hoped for.

God be blessed, she shouted to the court.

Long live the law.

For a very long time, people have used fairy tales to teach important lessons.

It's one of the most common themes in a lot of folklore, actually.

We keep those stories alive because, in some ways, they help do the same for us.

I think that's why it's so important to remember just how dark a lot of the stories we love started out in the beginning.

By cleaning them up and removing their R-rating, we might be making them more palatable to our modern sensibilities, but we're losing something in the process, because the things we fear, by definition, are dangerous.

And of course, everyone loves a good witch story.

Everyone wants to believe that if you study enough, dig deep enough, and be bold enough, they too can bend reality to their will.

And if the legacy of Leonarda's case is any indication, she sort of made that happen.

just not in the way she imagined.

She spun a story that people believed.

She wove a tapestry of fantasy about spells and fortunes and a fairy tale-like villain who killed and cooked her victims.

And the general public, both then and now, ate it up.

Most people will tell you that Leonarda Canciuli was a cold-blooded cannibal who cooked her victims like the witch from Hansel and Gretel.

But as the years have gone by, we're slowly realizing that her true power was building a massive web of lies around herself, a madness inspired by her mother's curse and fueled by a lifetime of events that seemed to confirm her fears.

A fairy tale in the oldest sense, with the grain of truth at its core.

Oh, and remember that curse that Leonarda was running from?

The Romani fortune-teller had taken both of her palms and explained that she saw two different destinies for her.

Her life would either end in a prison or an asylum.

And those possibilities frightened Leonarda into many of the unusual decisions that she made later on in life.

Well, her official sentence of 30 years began immediately after her trial.

She was placed in a criminal asylum, which, to her at least, must have felt like a hybrid of both options.

And she passed away before her sentence was up, dying of a stroke in 1970 at the age of 76.

It seems that the curse finally did come true.

The story of Leonardo Cenchuli is obviously a complex recipe of fears, guilt, and murder.

And I hope you enjoyed our attempt to demonstrate the power of the folklore surrounding her.

But she's not the only witch in history to try changing their luck with a bit of violence.

Stick around after this brief sponsor break to hear one more thrilling tale.

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A century ago, life in Hungary was hard.

The First World War had pulled over 9 million men out of the country to join the fight in Europe, and that devastated society on multiple levels.

How some of those who remained behind managed to cope, though, was just just as deadly.

Most people know enough about Budapest to recognize its place in history.

A city straddling a river that, in Roman times, marked the boundary between Asia and Europe.

It's a community split in half, two cities within one.

Outside, though, it's a lot of farmland, and that was where the deepest impact of the war was felt in the 1910s.

Many of those 9 million soldiers had been farmers and husbands, and their absence drove the economy and the people who remained behind into a depression.

But early on, a prison camp was set up southeast of Budapest for Allied soldiers captured in battle.

So while their men were gone, they realized they had a captive workforce, and the prisoners were put to work on the farms.

It put hands back on the plows and helped Hungary move forward, even if just a little bit.

But when their husbands and sons and fathers returned, many of them came back changed.

Today, we might talk about PTSD as a logical explanation, but a century ago, folks understood a lot less about the psychological effects of war.

All they knew back then was that these men weren't the same ones who left.

They were different.

Broken.

This was exactly what the women of the small village of Nagadiv experienced when their men returned.

Suddenly, there were people in their homes that behaved like monsters, abusing them, crushing their spirits, and disturbing any sort of peace they might have hoped for.

But there was someone to turn to.

Her name was Susanna Fizakis, and she was a relative newcomer to town.

She had arrived around 1911 and brought a much-needed skill to the village.

You see, she was a midwife.

Now, for a very long time, midwives were powerful women.

They helped the women of their communities through childbirth and even served as the best source around for medical advice before the advent of modern medicine.

But when childbirth became the purview of male medical doctors, these midwives saw their position in society slipping away.

It was only in places so remote and poor they couldn't support a doctor that the midwives held on, and Nagadiv was one such place.

So when the women of the village found themselves suddenly faced with an army of angry, abusive husbands, newly returned from the crucible of war, they reached out to Fizekas out of desperation.

She might be a midwife, but surely there was something else in her bag of tricks that could help them, right?

And that solution was arsenic.

She harvested it from fly paper and then secretly coached these women on how to use it to poison their troubled men.

Centuries before, women like Visekis would have sold what they called inheritance powders, poisons that helped them kill off the person standing between them and a large sum of money.

Here though, it was more about peace and safety.

Well, at first.

Before long, women were using the poison to simplify their lives in other ways.

War-shocked husbands were dying, yes, but so were children and parents.

And because the tiny village lacked any of the resources that might have equipped the authorities to track down and catch the killers, they got away with it.

It's estimated that over the course of nearly two decades, the women of Nagadiv murdered around 50 people, and each time they were quickly buried and their death certificates were managed by the town clerk, a woman in the confidence of the killers.

So what ended their reign of death?

Well, one of the men who was poisoned either died while on the river or was disposed of there, and his body washed down to a a larger town, one with a medical student who knew enough to test the body, revealing high doses of arsenic.

In the end, 26 women were arrested and put on trial, 10 of which were found guilty.

And the most shocking aspect of it all, according to those who lived there at the time, was the way these women presented themselves in court.

They seemed bored by it all.

as if slow justice wasn't as fun as the quick fix they had employed all those many years.

And Susanna Fizakis?

Fizakis, she apparently caught wind of the investigation before the police could find her.

When they finally knocked on her door, there was no answer, at least, not until they stepped inside.

That's where they found her body.

She had poisoned herself with the very same tool she taught the other women to use, a tool meant to solve their problems and destroy their monsters.

And she had used it on herself.

This episode of Lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with research by Robin Miniter and music by Chad Lawson.

Lore is much more than just a podcast.

There is a book series available in bookstores and online, and two seasons of the television show on Amazon Prime Video.

Check them both out if you want more lore in your life.

also make and executive produce a whole bunch of other podcasts, all of which I think you'd enjoy.

My production company, Grim and Mild, specializes in shows that sit at the intersection of the dark and the historical.

You can learn more about all of our shows and everything else going on over in one central place, grimandmild.com.

And you can also follow this show on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

Just search for lore podcast, all one word, and then click that follow button.

And when you do, say hi.

I like it when people say hi.

And as always, thanks for listening.

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