Episode 57: Quarantine

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This is the story of the one.

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About 20 miles to the west of the South African city of Umzinto, there used to be an old Catholic outpost called St.

Michael's Mission.

Along with serving as home to the missionaries working there, It was also the location of a small, peaceful orphanage.

In 1906, though, that peace was broken by an extraordinary event.

One of the older children, a 16-year-old girl named Clara Germana Cella, began to act strangely.

Although she'd never studied them, she suddenly became fluent in German, French, and Polish.

Witnesses also reported that she somehow knew the darkest secrets of complete strangers, as if she could read their minds.

They said she could levitate off the floor, sometimes as high as five feet, but the holy water would bring her back down.

On more than one occasion, Clara even tossed a nun across the room as if she were a ragdoll.

And the noises she made sounded as if, and I quote, a herd of wild beasts orchestrated by Satan had formed a hellish choir.

When they realized that Clara couldn't be near objects that had been blessed by a priest, they finally had their answer.

She was possessed, they said, by a demon.

Hers is one of countless possession stories told throughout history.

They span centuries and cultures and religions.

And all the while, people have been fascinated by them.

Maybe it's the darkness.

Maybe it's the loss of control.

Perhaps it's just our love of a good old-fashioned scary tale.

People are obsessed with stories about possession.

Look no further than Hollywood for proof.

Films like The Exorcist and Rosemary's Baby, along with every single episode of Supernatural, all hinge on the idea of dark forces taking control of innocent victims.

It makes for great entertainment.

Darkness sells, apparently.

These stories, it turns out, are almost always about individuals, one person possessed by evil, and the results of their condition.

But what happens when there are more than one?

What if an entire community falls victim to demonic possession?

It sounds unlikely, impossible even.

But 400 years ago, it actually happened.

I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore.

Deep in the French countryside, about 20 miles to the south of the town of Chinon, is an ancient little village that's home to just a few thousand.

The streets are picturesque, and the surrounding landscape is gorgeous.

But there are darker things in Loudon than you might expect.

In the early 1600s, Loudon sat on the border between two territories, the Protestants, also known in France as the Huguenots, and the Catholics.

Like everywhere else in Europe and England at the time, there was a lot of hostility between these two groups of Christians, but it was different in Ludon.

There, things seemed to be peaceful.

Side by side, Catholic and Protestant lived and worked together.

But being on the border between two regions meant that there was a lot of troop movement and in the early 1600s French troops were plagued by typhus.

It's an illness sometimes referred to as camp fever because it flourished in the overcrowded, unsanitary conditions of military campaigns.

And although the inflow of soldiers most likely brought a boost to the local economy, it also brought disease.

1632 was a hard year.

The community had been battling the pandemic for over five months, and it was taking its toll on them.

Some estimates report that about 26% of the population there died as a result of the illness.

Because of that, two different things were happening.

First, all of the people of wealth and importance were leaving town.

Doctors, priests, officials, anyone who could afford to really, all of them were fleeing to the countryside.

Second, those who remained behind set up quarantine measures to stop the spread of the disease.

And one of the groups that closed themselves off from the rest of the world was a convent of Urusalin nuns.

It wasn't an old convent, maybe six years old at the time, and so it was full of relatively young members.

Most of the women there had come from wealthy noble families, which made a lot of sense.

Saint Ursula was said to have been the daughter of a powerful ruler who was killed while on a religious pilgrimage.

Noble-born women of the time were drawn to that story and as a result, the order was flourishing.

In September of 1632, after months of quarantine and the death that surrounded it, the nuns began to report odd experiences.

On the 21st of that month, one of the women woke to find a man standing over the foot of her bed.

He was weeping and begged her to pray for him.

And he had a book, which he kept offering to her.

Alarmed, the nun called out for her roommate to wake up as well.

But when she did, the man vanished.

The two women had trouble sleeping, though, and stayed awake the rest of the night.

And all the while, both of them claimed they could still hear the man weeping and muttering quietly, as if he was still there, praying by himself in the shadows.

A few days later, another nun claimed to see a black sphere that floated up and down the corridors of the convent.

It even ran into one of the women, knocking her to the floor and leaving marks on her legs.

A week after that, Someone saw a skeleton walking around as if it were still alive.

But these events seemed to be the precursor to something darker.

It was that hot, sticky wind that blows in just before a tropical storm slams the coast.

Except, this storm would turn out to be far more frightening.

And it began with seizures.

Many of the nuns began to have violent convulsions.

When they could speak, they cried out that hands, invisible hands, were slapping and hitting them.

They heard voices and witnessed ghostly figures in their rooms.

Remember, this wasn't an isolated thing.

The experiences were spread across a whole group of women, and that caught the attention of church leadership.

When the Catholic confessor Jean-Mignon arrived on October 5th, there were eight nuns exhibiting these unusual symptoms, including the convent's prioress, Jeanne Desange.

Actually, she seems to be the worst of the lot, convulsing through the night and screaming what seemed like nonsense the entire time.

Suspecting a demon, Jean-Mignon demanded it to speak and identify itself.

But he wanted to be careful.

If, for some extraordinary reason, the prioress was faking it, he didn't want to make it easy to answer.

So he spoke to the demon in Latin, a language that he knew Desange did not understand.

Amazingly though, it replied, also in Latin.

But the answer was frightening beyond anything he might have expected.

Who are you?

he shouted.

The prioress looked at him, smiled, and then whispered three chilling words, Enemies of God.

One of the common beliefs in the 16th and 17th centuries was that a person had to strike a deal with the devil in order to obtain supernatural powers.

People all across Europe were accused of witchcraft for hundreds of years, but the core accusation was always that these individuals had somehow struck a bargain with evil spirits.

So it wasn't odd for Jean-Mignon to ask his next question, How were you invited into this convent?

The demon, through the mouth of Jeanne Desange, replied, a pact authored by Urbain Grandier.

It was an answer that Mignon had no problem accepting as true.

Why?

Well, to understand that, we need to take a moment to get to know Yerban Grandier, because not only was he real, he was right there in the convent.

Grandier, you see, was a priest.

This guy was handsome, suave, even seductive.

Think Jude Law in the young pope.

He'd been in Ludon for at least 15 years, and in that time, he'd built himself quite a reputation as a ladiesman.

Rumor had it that Grandier had fathered a child with the daughter of a local lawyer.

She was conveniently married off to someone from out of town, they say.

But that didn't stop his seemingly endless string of mistresses.

Just two years before the possessions began, Grandier had been brought before the court.

Other priests claimed to have seen him with women, married and unmarried alike.

Some of these women had even gone to Grandier's own room to visit him, alone.

But thanks to some powerful connections in town, he was released without conviction.

Which didn't sit well with the judge, a man who also happened to be the local representative for the Pope, the Bishop of Poitiers.

And Poitiers, it turns out, was a close friend of Jean Minyang.

Which begs a lot of questions, doesn't it?

Was there really an epidemic of demonic possession taking place?

Or was it a plot between Jean Mignon and Jeanne de Sange to finally get rid of Grandier?

I know, that's a lot of names, a lot of French, and a lot of intrigue, but real life is always more complicated than fiction.

Real or not, the evidence of demonic possession went on for months, and with it all came more exorcisms.

Every time a priest asked who the author of the pact was, Grandier's name would come up.

Over and over, the testimony against him, however unbelievable it might have been, was stacking up.

But at the same time, these unusual experiences pointed towards something, well, supernatural.

Witnesses reported that some of the afflicted nuns would shout expletives, something unbecoming of noble women, let alone ladies of the church.

Some of them barked like animals, while others uttered long diatribes in broken Latin.

Many of the nuns would expose themselves during their demonic fits or contort into positions that the priests considered obscene.

Naturally, the word of these events eventually spread outside the convent walls.

With the town-wide quarantine finally removed, dozens of people visited the convent with hopes of seeing for themselves what was really taking place.

News always has a way of spreading, just like a disease.

And in Ludon, it passed from mouth to ear, person to person, and finally made its way out into the countryside.

That's about the time when Grandier stepped in and tried to establish his own quarantine.

He didn't want news of the possessions and exorcisms to spread, spread and tried to shut off the convent from the rest of the world.

But Jean-Magnon and the prioress wouldn't allow it.

Let me say this.

I know Grandier's story isn't the most frightening and dark.

I get it.

He's political and religious and nothing different from anything we can find in the news today.

That doesn't make for the most interesting story, admittedly.

But if these demonic possessions were the elephant in the room, so to speak, then Grandier was the noose from which that elephant was hanged.

In November of 1633, the Loudun events finally reached the ears of King Louis XIII, who told his advisor about it.

And that advisor was none other than Cardinal Richelieu, a man with both immense political power and a deep personal grudge against, you guessed it, Urbain Grandier.

By mid-December, the authorities had arrived at the convent to help.

but they weren't there to end the exorcisms.

No, they came solely for one purpose, to arrest arrest Grandier.

He was immediately taken into custody, and by the 17th, he was on trial.

But the word trial might be misleading.

What happened next was more of an exhibition of the worst of human nature.

Looking back, it even put the demons to shame.

The trial began like you might expect.

Evidence was brought against Grandier, accusing him of a pact with the devil.

But as difficult to prove as that might sound today, the Loudun trial seems to have allowed almost anything to stand as evidence.

The nuns were all brought into the courtroom and given a chance to testify.

The prioress, Jeanne Desange, did more than speak though.

She was said to have levitated two feet off the floor.

Later, she also somehow stretched her body to a height of seven feet before shrinking back to normal.

One of the nuns reported horrible dreams in which Grandier appeared to her and forced her to do unspeakable things.

Once, when all the nuns involved were in the courtroom together, they passed out in unison.

collapsing on the floor in a bizarre synchronized wave.

Not wanting to leave anything to chance or fraud, the court also separated the nuns and questioned them individually.

But when they spoke, it was the demon inside them that communicated.

And these demons knew things that the nuns wouldn't have.

They knew right down to the day when some of the visiting priests had last confessed.

They even knew what was being said between two exorcists in another room across the building.

If the women were faking their symptoms, they were doing an amazing job.

Uncanny, really.

But the court didn't just test the nuns.

No, Grandier himself had to endure some very unusual treatment as well, all in an effort to prove whether or not he was in league with the devil.

And the primary way they did this was through a search for what they called devil's marks, sometimes referred to as a witch's mark.

These were thought to be the markings made by the devil himself on the people who struck bargains with him.

These spots were numb and never felt pain or bled.

Conveniently, they were also said to resemble normal scars, dark moles, unusual birthmarks, or even freckles.

Obviously, this made it impossible for the accused to prove their innocence, and the court knew this.

On December 7th of 1633, they imprisoned Grandier.

and then shaved his body and pricked him with needles all over, looking for all the places where he felt no pain or didn't bleed.

But they cheated.

According to a historian writing about 60 years later, it was well known that the surgeon in charge simply turned his needle around in certain places to avoid causing pain.

The crown jewel of their evidence, though, was the pact, the actual paper pact that Grandier was supposed to have made with the devil.

It was covered in the text of the agreement, as well as the personal seals of seven demons, and signed, they said, by Grandier, Grandier, using his own blood as the ink.

All of this was enough to convict Grandier, and he was sentenced to death.

And we can thank Cardinal Richelieu for that.

Because of his involvement, the case was never tried in a secular court.

Instead, it was a committee of his own creation that handled the whole proceedings, which meant Grandier's death sentence was incontestable.

He had no chance of freedom.

No hope.

No chance to prove his innocence.

They tortured him before his execution.

They used a device called the boot to crush both his legs.

They took all his money and possessions and delivered them to the king.

They beat him.

They pressed pins into his skin so deeply that they struck bone.

And not once did he give in and confess.

Where most people accused of witchcraft would give in and name other witches in an attempt to save themselves from pain, Grandier refused.

72 people gave false testimony against him in court, and yet he never once returned the favor.

The day of his execution, they carried him out of the prison toward the place where he would die, sort of a gallows built over a large pile of brush and kindling.

It was a simple, yet cruel system.

First, he would be handed a lit candle.

and then the trapdoor would open, hanging him.

Once dead, the candle would fall from his hand and onto the kindling, where it would ignite and burn his corpse.

It was, in essence, a deadly Rube Goldberg machine.

But once he was brought to the platform, the crowd became hysterical.

They wanted violent justice.

They threw holy water at him when he tried to address the crowd.

And so in an effort to please the angry mob, The executioner simply lit the funeral pyre and walked away.

Fueled by the dry brush and a whole lot of hatred, that fire consumed Grandiere alive.

This fascination with demonic possessions almost seems like it's been woven into the fabric of society.

We can go back into the depths of history and find countless examples of it in all shades and interpretations.

Judaism, Christianity, Islam, even Buddhism.

All of them have been a lens, providing a subtle twist on an old story.

Even the spiritualist movement of the 19th century added its own flavor.

Because of this long and winding thread woven into the tapestry of human history, many people can't help but see possession as a real thing.

Its history is the evidence.

The sheer volume, at least to them, has to account for something.

People like the former official exorcist of the Diocese of Rome, Father Gabriel Amorth.

Before he passed away in 2016, he claimed to have performed over 160,000 exorcisms in his career.

Others look to modern psychology, to diagnoses like schizophrenia or disassociative identity disorder.

The human mind is complex and fragile.

You don't have to be a psychologist to understand that either.

Looking around at our friends and family, many of us know firsthand how destructive mental illness can be.

Whatever the cause, it hasn't stopped people from reacting like monsters.

The execution of Urban Grandier was far from the first of its kind, and sadly, it wasn't the last.

When faced with events that are unexplainable, frightening, or contrary to our belief system, people have a tendency to overreact.

We quarantine, we ostracize, we lash out, sometimes violently.

In 2005, a young woman visited a monastery in Romania.

She was there to visit her brother, but during the Mass, she giggled uncontrollably.

The local psychiatrist wanted to treat her for schizophrenia.

but the monastery's priest had other plans.

The woman was chained to a large cross and gagged before leaving her alone in a cold room for three days.

She died as a result.

The execution of Grandier was supposed to stop the possessions, but it didn't.

The prioress, Jeanne Desange, continued to convulse and shout in Latin.

Others seemed to suffer the same symptoms around her.

Then, In October of 1637, she seemed to get better.

It was a miracle, they said.

Healed of her condition, she went on a pilgrimage to Rome and then back to France, where she stopped for a visit with, of all people, Cardinal Richelieu.

After that, she traveled France all over, telling her story and earning a living.

When Desange retired back at the convent years later, she became the local mystic and claimed to be able to communicate with angels, all of which brought her quite a lot of fame.

How nice for her.

Modern historians have since revisited that paper document, the one that was presented at Grandier's trial as his actual signed pact with the devil.

They brought in handwriting experts and dug into contemporary documents at the Loudon archives in an effort to determine if he really did sign it.

Surprisingly, they found a match, but it wasn't Grandier,

it was the prioress, Jeanne Desange.

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This episode of Lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with research help from Marcette Crockett.

Lore is much more than a podcast.

There's a book series in bookstores around the country and online, and the second season of the Amazon Prime television show was recently released.

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

I also make two other podcasts, Aaron Mankey's Cabinet of Curiosities and Unobscured, and I think you'd enjoy both.

Each one explores other areas of our dark history, ranging from bite-sized episodes to season-long dives into a single topic.

You can learn about both of those shows and everything else going on all over in one central place, theworldoflore.com slash now.

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

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

When you do, say hi.

I like it when people say hi.

And as always, thanks for listening.

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