Episode 83: Carried Away

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Just three miles west of the Swedish city of Ronaby stands one of the tallest runestones in the world.

It's been there for over 1500 years, along with two companion stones, and all of them have a sort of wavy, elongated shape to them, reaching up to the gray sky like broken fingers.

They are mysterious and ancient and larger than life.

And a few centuries ago, they were also in the way.

Local legend says that a farmer wanted to use the land in that corner of the field, so he set about trying to remove the stones.

Again, these things are giants, so as you can imagine, no amount of rope and horses could bring them down.

Desperate to get rid of them, he decided to break them with fire, literally burning the stones until they crumbled.

They say it was a calm, windless day when he piled the kindling around the base of the runestone and then set it all on fire.

At first, it looked as if his plan would work, work, but as the flames licked higher, a gust of wind blew in, and an instant later, the man's hair was on fire.

He slapped at his head and then fell to the ground, rolling in the grass, but it was too late.

Minutes later, the farmer was dead.

Had he been able to read the runes, he might have reconsidered his plan to destroy the monument.

Centuries later, scholars have been able to translate those runes, carved in what we now call Proto-Norse.

Here's what they say.

I, master of the runes, conceal runes of power here.

Unending maleficence and death to he who breaks this monument.

Most of us today don't live near cursed monuments, but we're more than familiar with the idea.

Whether it's the Chicago Cubs or the Kennedy family, we have an innate grasp of the meaning of a curse.

Some people write them off as fantasy, while others treat them with a healthy dose of respect.

Over the centuries, a few have even become obsessed with them.

Because if history has anything to say about it, it's easy to get carried away.

I'm Aaron Mankey, and this

is lore.

On March 29th of 1511, the five-week-old infant son of Richard Hune died unexpectedly while in the care of a wet nurse.

Naturally, Richard was heartbroken, and no amount of infant mortality statistics can brush away the grief he must have been feeling.

But life had to move on, so the funeral preparations began.

Richard Hune was a wealthy merchant tailor.

He was a generous man by all accounts, but also a successful businessman, which means he had money and influence.

But despite all of that, the funeral for his own son took place in the parish of his death, not the parish Hune called home.

That was the first insult.

The second came after the funeral was over, when the priest requested payment for the services.

Hune refused, and this set off a battle that lasted years.

He accused the priest of extortion, and they accused him of sins against the church.

He took them to court, and they threatened him with excommunication.

At the end of the back and forth, Hune found himself awaiting trial in jail, and in 1514, they found him hanging dead in his cell.

The assumption was suicide.

but more than a few suspected murder, which didn't reflect well on the crown.

So King Henry VIII gathered his council and asked if it might be possible to find the murderer.

One of the men spoke up and offered a solution.

He knew of a woman with strange abilities.

She'd helped him track down horse thieves in the past and could probably help them with this one as well.

The king was intrigued but also hesitant.

Is she in league with the devil?

he asked.

No, the counselor replied.

I've never seen her use any worse magic than looking at one's hand.

When asked just what her qualifications might be, the counselor told them all, My lords, she is an Egyptian.

This is the moment we desperately need Ron Howard's voiceover to break in, arrested development style, with a short rebuttal.

The woman the counselor was referring to was not an Egyptian in the sense that you or I might think of today.

She wasn't from Egypt or schooled in ancient Egyptian magical techniques.

She was just so wildly different from anyone else around her that, to the medieval mind, she must have been from the most most mysterious and mystical land they could think of.

The technical term for their assumption is exonym.

It's when people from outside a specific culture give their own outsider name to a place or people group.

Sometimes it was done out of spite, such as when Slavic people used to refer to Germans as Nemtzi, which meant mute, simply because they found the German language to be unintelligible.

Other times it was born out of ignorance, as illustrated here by the tale of King Henry VIII.

The Egyptian spoken of in that story was actually a Romani woman, and according to historian Francis Groom, it might just be the first mention of the Romani culture in connection with palm reading.

Over time, Egyptian was shortened to Egyptian, and then to the racial slur most Americans are familiar with today, the Gypsy.

Thanks to advancements in DNA science, we now know that the Romani people originated from the area now comprised of the northern parts of India and Pakistan.

They broke off from their ancestors around a thousand years ago and have since migrated around the world.

Today, there are perhaps 20 million Romani people spread across Spain, England, France, Canada, and many South American countries as well.

Even here in America, thousands of miles from the Europe the Romani have long called home, there are at least 1 million.

It's hard to imagine another culture with such courage to move on and risk new homelands.

In fact, that traveling mindset has also fed the stereotypes, turning the racial slur into a general term for anyone who wanders around without roots.

Sadly, all of that mysteriousness and migration left the Romani people with the unfair reputation of being untrustworthy.

In fact, so many people assumed that the Romani were thieves that they began to refer to the act of being cheated as being gypped.

Most people today are ignorant of that term's offensive roots, so I'm telling you.

The more you know, right?

The truth is, humans have always been horrible at treating outsiders fairly.

And when your entire culture is built around having to travel from place to place and never settling down, you're always going to be the outsider.

Which might explain why the Romani people have been so mistreated over the centuries.

Sadly, Mistrust has been the least of their persecutions.

For a very long time, while slavery was active and thriving in Europe, the Romani people held almost no rights of their own.

In fact, some countries legally classified them as slaves from the 14th century all the way up to the 1840s.

In 1531, England passed the Egyptians Act, accusing the Romani culture of crime, deceit, and black magic and expelling all of them from the kingdom.

And that fearful, ignorant piece of legislation stayed on the books until 1856.

In the ultimate act of hatred toward outsiders, the Nazi Party stripped German Romani of their citizenship in 1935.

They were subject to the same violence and imprisonment as their Jewish neighbors, and upwards of 1 million Romani were killed in extermination camps.

Clearly, the Romani culture is as rich and textured as their history is deeply tragic.

But over the centuries, it has acquired more than just exonyms and ethnic slurs.

More than any other culture in the world, they seem to have attracted a reputation as a magical people.

They are mysterious, complex, and gifted in a whole litany of powerful, fascinating abilities.

And at the top of that list is the one thing that both enchants and terrifies the people who don't understand their culture:

the Romani Curse.

Jan Ewers was born in Belgium in 1922, in the city of Antwerp.

His father, Eugene, was an artist, and his mother, Magda, was a human rights activist.

They were an open-minded couple who cared less about a person's ethnicity and more about their humanity, and they raised Jan to be the same.

Sometime during the summer of 1934, Jan encountered a Romani camp just outside of the city, and in the process, he met a number of other boys his age.

For weeks, he returned day after day to spend more time with them, partly because that's what children do, and partly due to an attraction he felt to the unique culture that surrounded him there.

There was something magical about his friends and their world.

The leader of the camp was a man named Pulika.

Like Jan, he too was happy for the boys of his camp to have found the new friend.

And even though Jan was a gaje, a Romani term for an outsider, Pulika and the others welcomed him in.

By the end of the summer, Jan didn't want to leave, so he asked his parents for permission to move to the camp permanently.

I know how crazy that sounds today.

Modern parents have a hard time letting their children out of their sight, let alone giving them permission to move in with a whole other community miles away.

But as I mentioned before, Jan's parents were very open-minded, and to them, this apparently wasn't that big of a deal, so they agreed.

According to Jan, writing much later in life about his experiences, the camp encountered a challenge one day.

Pulika's sister, Carolina, had discovered a small pouch of gold coins she had hidden away was gone.

Her first thought was that an outsider had come in during the night and taken it, but there was no way anyone could have known where it had been kept.

The most likely thief, she said, was one of their own.

So Pulika called for a public trial known as a crease.

The entire community gathered outside of the camp in an open space, and Pulika shared his sister's story.

Evidence was presented, theories were expressed.

When he was done, he asked for the thief to step forward and confess to the crime.

But no one did.

Pulika's request was met by nothing but silence, and so he was forced to move on to the next step, the sentencing.

Walking slowly past each member of his community, he spoke a series of curses over them.

Here's a sample of what they contained, according to Jan.

One said, If you know or have heard anything related to the gold pieces stolen from Carolina and you do not inform this crease, may you die in horrible agony.

Another curse curse promised more of the same.

If, after the administration of the oath, you intend in any way to have profit or pleasure or possession of the gold pieces stolen from Carolina, may God take away your strength and your pleasure.

May sterility deprive you of posterity.

Clearly, this was heavy stuff, intended to give the thief as much incentive as possible to come clean and confess their crime.

As the curses were spoken over the gathered people, each member of the the community received them by replying with the Romani equivalent of, I do.

They were creating a binding agreement with a foundation of deadly curses.

But no one dropped dead or became terribly ill that day in the field outside of camp.

Everyone assumed that the thief had indeed been an outsider, and in the end, all of the leaders of the community just donated money to Carolina to pay back her loss.

But the experience taught Jan Urs much about how the Romani viewed and used curses.

In our modern pop culture-fed minds, a Romani curse is a magical incantation that alters the present and future of an individual.

It's the plot of Stephen King's novel Thinner come to life, where a person's life is destroyed as a result of a curse.

But to the Romani, that's not how curses work.

In fact, they never curse one another at all.

They either curse themselves or outsiders, and each type of curse functioned in a different way.

Within the Romani community, curses are actually used to keep yourself in check.

A curse is a promise, an oath, where you declare what might happen to you if you broke your own word.

Jan Yurz learned a number of them from his Romani friends, including, may my blood spill, or may my father, mother, and brothers die.

These were phrases that sealed agreements, like signing on the dotted line.

They were, in a sense, the weights that kept the scales of society in balance.

The other type of curse was the kind uttered to outsiders, the Gaje.

According to Jan Yures, the Romani didn't actually believe these curses had magical powers.

What they do believe, though, is that the weight of the words themselves can have a deep impact on the lives of the people who hear them.

So, If a Romani were to pull an outsider aside and say to them, you will die a horrible death, they aren't actually predicting or altering the future of that person.

They're planting a seed and letting the receiver's mind take over.

Soon enough, all that person will be able to think of is their impending horrible death.

Whether or not it actually happens is secondary to the months or years lived in constant fear of its truthfulness.

Which leaves us with a more troubling question to deal with.

It's not about whether curses are real and powerful, so much as it is about who's to blame blame when things go wrong.

Have we really become the victim of a sorcerer uttering dangerous words?

Or do our own human minds get swept up in the tidal wave of fear and doubt?

Either way, the results leave us wondering who is in control, the curse or the cursed?

Thankfully, there's one story from the 19th century that just might hold the answer.

It might not be what we're expecting, but the picture it paints for us is troubling nonetheless.

Troubling and more than a little terrifying.

They wanted him to be a lawyer, and instead, he fell in in love with acting.

Charles was just 17 when he took his first role at a local theater in Dublin, Ireland, but that was enough.

Not only was he hooked, but the people around him were as well.

Charles was born to act, and by the time he arrived in New York City in 1876, he was 34 years old and the proud owner of an international reputation.

He was a powerhouse, too, dazzling audiences with his various Shakespearean roles while also writing popular plays of his own.

So when he arrived in America, everyone wanted a piece of him.

The trouble was, there were parts of his life that no one would ever get to see, because Charles believed that he had been cursed.

According to the memoir of a business partner, When Charles was still a young man in Europe, he encountered a Romani fortune teller who gave the actor a glimpse into his future.

He would be famous, she told him, but at the height of that fame, it would all come to an end with his tragic death.

After that, his soul would wander until it could return home.

Now, I don't know how you go about processing something like that.

Maybe you brush it off and ignore it, or perhaps you look for the silver lining within.

He was going to be famous, she told him.

At least there was that, right?

So Charles threw himself into the career he loved.

and he thrived at it.

But deep in the recesses of his mind, there would always be that worry, as if the words spoken by the fortune-teller cast a shadow over his bright future.

For 17 years, Charles Coughlin traveled country and performed for sold-out audiences.

For a while, he worked as the star of a theater company run by the actress Lily Langtree, author of that memoir I mentioned a moment ago.

A little over a decade later, though, he joined his sister Rose in forming a theater company of their own.

and it was an immediate success.

The early 1900s were a blur for Charles.

He had arrived in America with a woman named Louisa Thorne and their infant daughter Gertrude.

Over the years that followed, they were rarely seen apart, traveling with Charles all over America and Canada.

But when the gothic tales of ghosts and murder on Canada's Prince Edward Island caught his attention, Charles took his family to visit and bought a house for them to stay.

That home became his refuge for the rest of his life.

He would write there every summer, crafting the plays that he and Rose would bring to life on tour throughout the rest of the year.

His career regularly took him away and around the country, but he always managed to find his way back to Prince Edward Island.

It was where he felt creative and safe, and where he belonged.

It was home.

In 1893, though, everything fell apart.

Charles secretly married a young woman from his theater company, setting off a controversy that landed him on the front page of the New York Times.

Louisa, it turns out, hadn't been his legal wife, and Charles had fallen in love with another woman.

The fallout destroyed his reputation, drove his sister Rose away, and ultimately ended the marriage before it could even begin.

In June of 1894, he returned to Prince Edward Island, where Louisa miraculously took him back, and the couple tried to move on.

His career took longer to heal, though.

It wasn't until the end of the 1890s that Charles was ready to head back out on tour, and when he did it, it was to London, not America.

Maybe he hoped that the vast Atlantic Ocean could somehow wash away the debris from his failures.

Maybe he was just afraid.

I don't know.

But it seemed to have worked, and so he returned to America.

The end came in November of 1899.

Charles and Rose were in Galveston, Texas, where their company was performing a play called The Royal Box.

But Charles was sick and an understudy had to take over.

For most of the month, he battled that illness, but on November 27th of 1899, he passed away.

Charles Coughlin was just 57 years old.

His story doesn't end there, though.

After his death, a funeral service was held in Galveston, but there was some confusion about what to do with his body.

According to the New York Times, his family wanted the coffin transported to Prince Edward Island, but another article in the very same paper said it would be coming to New York.

Not knowing what to do, a church in Galveston placed his coffin in a temporary vault while the decision was made.

Then, the most deadly hurricane in American history made landfall.

Historians have called it the Great Galveston Hurricane, the Great Storm of 1900, or simply, the storm.

It was a Category 4 that destroyed nearly 4,000 buildings and killed over 8,000 people.

Much of the town was flooded by a storm surge of over 15 feet, and in the process, most of the cemetery where Coughlin's body waited in storage was carried away, swept out to sea by the stormy waves.

In 1904, four years after the deadly hurricane, Charles appeared once again in the New York Times.

The article reported on the rumor that his coffin had been found 18 miles north of Galveston, but they weren't quite sure if it was true, and it was never verified.

Then, four years later, Something unbelievable happened.

Two fishermen were walking along the coast of Prince Edward Island in 1908 when they saw something on the rocks.

It was a large object, and thinking it might perhaps be a rowboat that had escaped its mooring, they approached it for a closer look.

A few strides before reaching it, they knew something was wrong.

It wasn't a boat after all.

It was a coffin.

The two men glanced at each other.

and then slowly moved closer.

One of them spotted a small metal plaque on the top of the coffin, so he leaned in to inspect it.

After brushing away the sand and seaweed, he caught his breath at the name engraved upon it.

Nearly eight years and 5,000 miles later, it seems, Charles Coughlin had finally come home.

The curse is a convenient idea.

It's one of those tools that gets brought out and used more than any other superstition.

Life didn't go the way you were hoping.

It was a curse.

Our actions came with consequences we weren't happy about.

Clearly, there was a curse involved.

And the more severe those consequences, the more likely humans are to connect those dots.

It's understandable then how the Romani people have been pulled into that superstitious black hole.

They're a mystery to a lot of us, an exotic and magical culture that seems to defy the social norms we're familiar with.

Those aren't bad things, but humans are so very good at looking for something to fear.

The unknown, the mysterious, the outsider, and the Romani, like the curses we associate with them, seem to fit that bill.

They're still a misunderstood culture today, and that means the prejudice and racism they've experienced has never really gone away.

Italy has referred to them recently as the Nomad Emergency, and in 2010, France began a deportation program that saw tens of thousands of Romani kicked out of the country.

Czechoslovakia even carried out a sterilization program on Romani women between 1973 and 1989.

Clearly, there's still a lot of work to do if we're ever going to cut through the superstitions and lies and see this beautiful culture for what it is.

But that's the power of perspective.

If you dig deep enough, the truth is usually waiting there to be discovered.

And it seems that's just as true when talking about Charles Coughlin's amazing floating casket.

We have the tale of the wave-swept graveyard on record in two places, both of which were written by people who worked with Charles during his career, although only one of those sources goes on to describe the return journey to Prince Edward Island.

Still, that was enough to get the tale picked up by Robert Ripley, who included Coughlin's tale in his first collection of Ripley's Believe It Or Not cartoons.

And how could he not?

This was an amazing, compelling story.

His publisher, though, wanted a bit more proof, so an investigator was sent to Prince Edward Island to dig up the truth.

Coughlin's daughter Gertrude still lived in the house, and according to her, she had never discovered the location of her father's remains.

The true source of the tale might be the industry Charles worked in his entire life.

Actors, producers, the whole world of theatrical performers, it's an industry built around drama and suspense.

Sure, maybe they knew something no one else did, contrary to Gertrude and others who swore it never happened.

Or perhaps the disappearance of Coughlin's coffin inspired them to simply fill in the blanks, to give a messy story a tidy ending.

Whether or not his coffin really did float all the way from Texas to Canada, We can still see the marks on his life left by that curse.

His relentless pursuit of success, his bizarre and shameful decisions, his longing for a peaceful home, all of it point to a man who knows his days are numbered.

It doesn't justify his flaws, but it certainly goes a long way toward explaining their expression in his life.

Perhaps the true power of a curse is its ability to alter our actions and decisions and fears.

rather than doom someone to a tragic death.

But then again, I'm not so sure about that.

You see, there's more to that story I told you earlier about the Romani trial that Jan Yors witnessed as a teenager.

And if we take it at face value, it means we have to reconsider everything our rational minds tell us about how curses work.

A few years after that community trial outside the Romani camp, one of the women who had sworn that oath lay dying in bed.

She hadn't moved from her home in days.

Horrible pain consumed her entire body, and she was too weak to speak.

But she still managed to motion for her daughter to go to a particular spot in the corner of the room, and then rubbed her fingers together in the sign of money.

The daughter searched for a hidden door or latch, and when she found it, she was amazed by what she saw inside.

It was a small pouch of gold coins.

One that she had never seen before, and at the same time, She knew exactly where it came from.

She brought the stolen gold over to her mother, whose face was now wet with tears.

It was clear that the guilt of her theft had haunted her ever since that trial, the trial where she swore an oath to die in horrible agony if she ever failed to tell the truth.

Then, slowly, she closed her eyes, took one final breath, and then passed away.

We all get carried away sometimes, don't we?

In the end, though, the only question that matters is

by what?

The story of Jan Yuers living among the Romani people of Belgium is a powerful one because it's not often we get such an intimate glimpse into a mysterious culture.

But you'd be amazed at how those five years transformed the rest of his life.

Stick around after the break to learn more.

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After his time living with the Romani community outside Antwerp, Jan Yurs moved on.

In the 1940s, though, he found a noble use for his knowledge of their culture and the unusual relationships that he'd formed.

When World War II began, Jan joined the French Resistance, specifically working to help France and Belgium coordinate their efforts against the Nazis.

Jan managed to enlist the help of the Romani of the area to help transport information and weapons across enemy lines, and in doing so, he gave the resistance a badly needed advantage and ticked off the German forces.

When the Nazis finally captured him, they spent over six months torturing him before finally sentencing him to death.

Miraculously though, he managed to escape before his execution day arrived and slipped away into Spain.

Beyond yours wasn't done, not by a long shot.

Once in Spain, he dressed himself as an SS officer and used the disguise to help smuggle Allied troops into Germany.

He was captured a second time and sent to yet another concentration camp, but managed to slip out of that one as well.

Once free, he did the most logical thing he could think of.

He went home to Belgium, where he joined the fight once again.

I think in the end, the idea of curses really just comes down to our decisions.

Sometimes, like Charles Coughlin, we choose things that pull us off the path and lead us into the dark and dangerous woods.

The choices have consequences we simply can't avoid.

Other times, we stay the course.

We follow the path, and we make it through to safety.

Jan Yurz managed to do just that, and the world is a better place for it.

If there's a lesson in there for us today, I think it's a pretty simple one.

Stay the course, and don't get cursed.

This episode of lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with research help from Carl Nellis and music by Chad Lawson.

Special thanks to Francesca Ramsey from MTV's Decoded for walking me through some of the more invisible aspects of the racism and cultural appropriation surrounding the Romani culture.

Check her out over at MTV.com/slash shows slash decoded.

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