Episode 184: Falling to Pieces

This is the story of the one.

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Everyone loves to collect things.

It might run the spectrum from the casual gathering of favorite toys to the intricate organization of classic valuable collectibles, but there's no denying the popularity of the act.

I'm sure you can remember one or two of your childhood collections.

I know I can.

And let me tell you, no one else in my neighborhood had as many buckeyes as me in the third grade.

Honestly, if it was significant, valuable, or just plain cool, all of us at one time or another have started a collection.

Most people accumulate normal objects, but every now and then you can bump into things that are more unusual.

We've all seen the TV episodes over the years that dive deep into this weird world.

Homes filled with beer cans, basements overflowing with boxes of beanie babies.

Name a pop culture icon and there are probably dozens, even hundreds of people out there who collect anything related to it.

When I think about big collections, I always remember one of my father's friends.

He retired very young and spent years converting his home into a paradise for lovers of baseball memorabilia, game-worn uniforms, signed baseballs, cards, toys.

You name it, he had it.

But if there's one thing I've learned about people over the years, it's that humans, as a species, are very good at crossing the line.

We have a tendency to take things too far, and when we do, it often makes an impression.

Some people have never been satisfied with accumulating happy meal toys or rare coins.

They're drawn to something different, something darker.

And their collections across history have demonstrated one truth that's difficult for many of us to swallow.

If there's one thing humans have always been good at collecting, it's ourselves.

I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore.

Let's be honest, none of us are strangers to seeing dead things on display.

After all, that's what taxidermy is, right?

Technically, it's the art of preserving an animal's skin, together with everything else that makes it it what it is, its feathers, or fur, or even scales, and the practice has been around for thousands of years.

Is it a serious field?

Absolutely.

And did it help advance natural science through the 18th and 19th centuries?

For sure, but it's also left us with some truly unusual collections.

For example, did you know that the oldest surviving example of taxidermy is a crocodile that's on display in a cathedral in Ponta Nossa, Italy?

Actually, no one is sure just how old it is, but there are records of it being temporarily moved during some renovations in 1534.

So at the very least, it's nearly 500 years old.

Why it's been kept in a cathedral of all places is a mystery to me, but I have to assume the people there believe it's beneficial in some way.

You know, for the Gator good.

But beyond taxidermy, humans have been using animal parts as charms for a very long time.

The rabbit's foot is a great example, showing how people have attached supernatural powers to ordinary objects purely because they came from a living thing.

U.S.

President Grover Cleveland owned one, given to him as a gift to bring him luck during his campaign.

Interestingly, it was said to have come from a rabbit that had been killed on the grave of the outlaw Jesse James, giving the charm even more power and significance.

But if you look back on the pages of history and scan for body parts that were collected because of their significance, the truly dark stories are about something else, human bodies.

And while their use runs the spectrum, you can boil most of them down to two categories, relics and trophies.

Now, relics are something most people have a rough understanding of.

In a number of religions around the world, human body parts have taken on powerful meaning.

In the Christian world, that began nearly 2,000 years ago with a movement that some scholars call the cult of the saints.

These people would disinter the graves of revered and famous Christian leaders and martyrs and bring their bodies, or at least pieces of them, back home to put on display in their own places of worship.

Today it's hard to tour a European cathedral or castle and not see a gilded container on display with a sign that claims the bone of some early Christian saint is resting safely inside.

But Christians weren't the only people who were collecting human body parts to enhance their faith.

There are many images of Hindu deities wearing human skulls as jewelry, or drinking from them like cups, and that's mirrored in the practices of a small group of Hindu followers known as the Aghori, who use human bones in their rituals.

And in the middle of Sri Lanka is a Buddhist temple known as the Temple of the Tooth.

Without overstating the obvious, this temple holds a tooth that was said to belong to the Buddha, taken from his funeral pyre by a disciple.

And like a lot of religious relics across the world, this tooth is said to give healing powers to the temple that possesses it.

But there are only so many relics to go around, right?

And that's where trophies come in.

They don't draw their power from connection to a major world religion, though.

Instead, their power is in how they were taken.

And a great example is the global practice of scalping.

From the indigenous peoples of North and South America to Central European cultures like the Scythians, the winners in battle often brought home the scalps of their enemies.

But what most people don't know is that it's an evolution of an older tradition of bringing home their entire heads.

The trouble with human heads though is that they're heavy and they take up a lot of space.

And if your army was particularly successful, it became difficult to bring home all the heads necessary to make cups out of those skulls.

So cultures evolved, opting to cut off lighter, more portable parts of the human body.

In Japan though, they picked something else, noses and ears.

And many scholars think we have one man to thank for that, a Japanese feudal lord named Toyotomi Hideyoshi.

In the early 1590s, he led his forces to invade the Korean peninsula and demanded that his soldiers prove their loyalty by bringing back severed noses and ears.

The invasion failed, but the Japanese ended up with more than 100,000 of these human trophies on their hands.

So they were buried.

In the city of Kyoto, there's a place called Mimizuka, which means ear mound.

It's estimated that nearly 40,000 human ears and noses are buried inside, each one having first been pickled in brine and then inspected before it was placed inside.

And there's a joke in there somewhere about picking your friend's nose, but I'm going to leave that one for you to figure out.

People have always been drawn to human body parts.

Whether as tools of faith or conquest, they have been central to many cultures around the world.

But those aren't the only reasons that people have collected human remains.

For some, it's been a lot more personal.

Every society has had to deal with killers, people who take the lives of other human beings without regard for their value and sanctity.

But every now and then, a killer comes along who takes a bit more than that.

I don't know a single person who hasn't heard of Jack the Ripper.

In fact, he just might be the most famous murderer in history thanks to sensationalist newspapers and our never-ending hunger for unsolved mysteries.

And most people can give you the basic details about the case.

What they often forget, though, is that Jack the Ripper did more than kill his victims.

In many cases, he left with his own personal trophies.

Of the five victims that are accepted by historians as clearly the work of the Ripper, there are instances of missing organs.

The body of victim number two, for example, Annie Chapman, was found with her uterus missing.

Victim number four, Catherine Eddoes, also had her uterus taken by the killer, as well as one of her kidneys.

And the last victim, Mary Kelly, was mutilated so badly that physicians were honestly unsure what organs might have been missing.

And it's also important to point out that when the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee received the infamous From Hell letter in October of 1888, it came with half a human kidney.

The author of the letter claimed that he kept the other half for himself, which he fried and ate and found it very nice.

And if America has their own counterpart to Jack the Ripper, it's probably H.H.

Holmes, a figure we've discussed here a couple of times before.

On the surface, Holmes was a predator who used his position as the owner of an apartment building in the middle of the busy 1893 World's Columbian exhibition in Chicago to find his victims.

But Holmes was more than that.

He started out as a medical student at the University of Michigan, where he routinely stole corpses and tried to use them in insurance fraud schemes.

Even earlier than that, he was known as the kid who loved to torture animals.

So yeah, he had a lot of experience before arriving in Chicago.

It was there, though, in his house of horrors, that he truly came into his own.

And as he claimed the lives of more and more victims, they were each transported to the basement of the building where he made the evidence go away.

Yes, a lot of it was dissolved in acid, but he did keep some parts for himself.

The skeletons.

Once cleaned and articulated, many of those were sold to medical professionals as tools, passing his trophies over to someone else who would prize them for different reasons.

But there are few killers from history that hold a candle to Ed Gein.

Born in Wisconsin in 1906, he was raised in a troubled home by an abusive mother.

She refused to let him form friendships outside the house, forcing him to spend his childhood pretty much alone, and it had a visible effect on his personality, something his teachers noticed early on.

As he got older, though, those odd quirks began to evolve into deadly hobbies.

It's believed by many that his first murder victim was his own brother, Henry.

and there were others after that.

But it was the murder of a woman named Bernice Warden, the owner of the local hardware store, that led authorities to his door.

When they arrived, they discovered something out of a horror film.

The body of Bernice Warden had been hung up and eviscerated like an animal.

Her head, though, was in the kitchen, but as they looked around, the police found other items that were older and equally chilling.

There was a wastebasket covered in human skin, bowls made from human skulls.

More skulls were found like ornaments on his bedposts, and a lampshade that was made from from more human skin.

They even found a pair of homemade leggings that Gein had crafted from actual legs of another victim.

And I wish that was his full list, but sadly Ed Gein was a busy man.

If you have a strong stomach and are a bit more adventurous, you can do your own research easily.

But I think the message is clear.

Some people throughout history have taken their hunger for human remains to a dark, horrific place.

Thankfully, we can rest easy knowing people like Jack the Ripper and Ed Gein were rare outliers.

They aren't the norm and are certainly not very common.

At least, that's the hope, isn't it?

On a beautiful spring day in May of 1858, some neighborhood boys took a shortcut through the graveyard in the Irish village of Drumcliffe.

They might have been looking for a faster way home, but what they found was something much more terrifying.

It was an open grave, and inside it, the violated remains of a man.

That man, it turns out, was the former sheriff of Limerick, Ralph Westrop Brereton.

He had been a man with a reputation for large living, a sort of extrovert who loved to throw parties, entertain friends, and laugh loudly.

Some of the more reserved folks in town blamed that on the years he spent in Paris decades earlier, but that was just a theory.

Brereton had passed away from apparent natural causes on March 23rd, just about five weeks prior to the crime.

But what exactly that crime was was still a mystery.

So the authorities got to work, because not only had his grave been dug up and his coffin opened, but his body had also been brutally cut into.

Now, the first theory was a common one.

Someone must have poisoned him and then returned after burial to steal his stomach.

In a day and age when it was almost impossible to detect poisons in an autopsy, the stomach was one of the very few places they might have looked for proof.

Killers in the past had done exactly the same thing, returning later to cut out the stomach and dispose of it elsewhere.

Thankfully, before they could go knocking on doors of people they believed might be suspects, someone noticed that it wasn't actually the stomach that had been taken.

I can't blame them though, from what I've read the thieves weren't the most precise anatomists around, and they made quite a mess of the poor old man.

No, it turns out that something else had been stolen from Mr.

Brereton.

His fat.

Now I know what you're thinking.

Most of us are doing our best to get rid of fat, so who in the world might actually dig up a month-old corpse for it?

Well, the answer may surprise you, because even in 1858, there was a good amount of superstition still lingering from an older era, and one of those folktales had to do with butter.

Work with me here.

I promise it will all make sense to you when I'm finished.

You see, back then there was a lot writing on the health of livestock.

Cows provided milk, a lot of which was turned into butter.

So the healthier the cows, the more butter you might have around the house.

But rather than blame things like the weather or disease if their butter production was low, locals would often blame witchcraft.

Not witches per se.

Apparently anyone could recite a simple spell, turning every cranky neighbor into a potential source for curses.

Thankfully though, there was a way to beat them at their own game, and clues to that are embedded in the details of the crime.

First, the date of the crime.

Brereton's body had been dug up and mutilated on May 1st, otherwise known as May Day or Beltane.

It was an ancient day of celebrating a lot of things, including fertility and the return of life to the world in the spring.

It was the beginning of a new phase of the year, and because of that, it was a liminal space, a time of transition, when superstitions and magic had more power.

And one of the most vulnerable elements in their lives at that time of the year was dairy produce.

In fact, an unusually high percentage of May Day-related superstitions have to do with the production of butter.

Weird, I know, but this was incredibly important to folks at the time.

And second, the thing that was stolen, Brereton's actual human fat, wasn't a new thing.

Because as the authorities started to poke around looking for answers, they quickly encountered the widely held belief that a butter charm could be crafted by anyone looking to protect their butter production.

All you needed was some human fat molded into the shape of a candle, which you would burn throughout May, when the risk was the greatest.

Like I said earlier, humans have a knack for crossing the line.

Over the past few thousand years, people from cultures around the world have turned a healthy love for collecting things into a dark obsession involving human remains, frequently by violating a grave and almost always to support a superstitious belief.

Stealing the fat from a corpse and then burning it like a candle certainly fits that description.

And it probably didn't smell very good either.

I'm a collector.

The odds are pretty good that you are too.

Maybe for you the hobby is casual, and it looks more like you're saving important objects from your past than any sort of specific theme.

Or maybe you inherited a collection from someone in your family, turning you into a custodian of something larger than yourself.

That's how the Muder Museum started back in 1858.

Thomas Dent Mooter was a physician in Philadelphia back in the first half of the 19th century, and over his years in practice he built up quite the collection of medical specimens.

You know, brutal-looking metal instruments and glass jars filled with human organs and tumors suspended in preserving agents.

It's one of those rare collections of human remains that transcends the line.

Instead of crossing it in some bizarre way, it gathers a whole bunch of useful objects that have helped medical students grow in their knowledge and understanding.

Because sometimes, even the oddest collections manage to serve a good purpose.

The human fat thief from Drumcliffe, Ireland was not one of those collectors, though.

Did it work?

We honestly have no way of knowing that.

As far as I can tell, there are no records from the summer or fall of 1858 documenting some increase in butter production.

No locals were implicated in a plot to bewitch their neighbors' livestock, and no suspects were ever arrested or put on trial for the theft.

Still, it was the single most exciting thing to happen in the Drumcliffe Cemetery.

That is until 1939, when legendary poet William Butler Yeats was buried there, turning the place into holy ground for fans of Irish literature.

Thankfully, no one has ever dug him up looking for a relic.

But if history is any indication, that doesn't necessarily mean no one has ever thought about it.

They just weren't willing to cross the line.

Tales of those who have collected human remains will always be entertaining and more than a little horrifying.

And there doesn't seem to be an end to them either.

In fact, I've saved one more unique story of trophies and tragedy.

And if you stick around through this brief sponsor break, I'll tell you all about it.

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Her story was pretty common for Scotland in the early 1700s.

Even the records of her final days show the sort of prejudice and bias she was up against by listing her name half a dozen different ways.

Sometimes she was called Lily, and other times some variation on the name Lilius.

Either way, she was in trouble.

In June of 1704, a neighbor accused Lily of witchcraft, probably after some sort of disagreement.

Lily was around 60 years old at the time, and there's no record of her having a husband, so she made the perfect target.

She was old and unmarried, making her an outsider to many.

And I don't have to explain to you why it was bad to be accused of witchcraft in Scotland in those days.

Between 1560 and 1730, roughly 3,500 women were executed as witches, although some estimates put that number much higher.

After all, good record keeping wasn't important when it came to outsiders and heretics.

So Lily was arrested and then they questioned her.

And it was exactly the sort of interrogation you might imagine from a witch trial too.

Lots of leading the witness, lots of questions about packs with the devil, and lots and lots of torture to make sure they received the answers they were looking for.

One of the women who testified against her, Jean Bizette, was recorded as seeming drunk, and yet her claims of witchcraft aimed at Lily were believed by the court.

The deck was stacked against her, and it was the sort of situation where you might expect her to fight back.

But she didn't.

No, Lily did something different.

She confessed.

Her trial documents are filled with stories she told to the court, each one more detailed than the last.

I have no idea why she did it.

Maybe she saw the futility in defending herself against a town that was hell-bent on convicting her.

But she just sort of leaned into her crime and went deep.

After she was officially charged and found guilty by the court, they discovered that they had a new problem on their hands.

because Lily took control of the trial one final time, taking her own life while still in jail, which meant that she died before having a chance to repent, a bad sign in their eyes.

Stripped of their options, the authorities decided to give her a deviant burial, a burial meant to prevent the body from coming back to life, otherwise her lord the devil would return for her, resurrect her, and then set her corpse loose on the community.

And honestly, no one wants an undead witch terrorizing their village.

So Lily's remains were placed in a box, probably much smaller than a coffin, and then buried in the tidal area along the shore.

It was one of those liminal spaces, a place that's in between two worlds, the sea and the earth, and therefore in a powerful supernatural place as well.

After burying the box, a large stone was placed on top, just an added measure to prevent her resurrection.

After that, life moved on, and soon enough, Lily Addy was forgotten, buried in the past just as she had been interred in the wet sand along the shore.

Nearly a century and a half later though, that changed.

A local antiquarian named Joseph Neal Patton discovered the location of Lily's grave and hired some workers to help him dig her up.

He was interested in her skull, being a follower of a new discipline called phrenology, but the rest of her remains were scattered among a handful of owners.

Interesting side note, modern forensic experts have been able to use photographs of that skull to reconstruct her face, giving us the only known accurate likeness of a Scottish witch trial victim.

But that's not the only thing people built.

Remember that small box that she was buried in?

Well, it was broken down into smaller pieces of wood and then crafted into a handful of ornate walking sticks.

They might not have been actual human remains, but they had a deep connection to a woman executed for witchcraft, and that was attractive to some people.

Many of the walking sticks found their way into private hands, and at least two of them are in a museum in Scotland today.

One of them, though, was owned for a time by a man named Robert Brimmer, who helped dig up her remains in 1852.

But he wasn't its last owner.

No, he eventually gave that walking stick to another man as a gift, a Scottish-born immigrant to the United States, who grew up to become one of the wealthiest men in the world.

He forged his wealth in the steel industry and then poured much of it into libraries all across America.

His name is Andrew Carnegie.

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

Lore is much more than just a podcast.

There's 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.

I 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 those shows and everything else going on over in one central place, grimandmild.com.

And you can 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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