Behind the Scenes Minis: Martian Skulls

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello and happy Friday. I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And I'm Holly Frey. This week we talked about Sarah Weiss and her journeys to Mars. Indeed. A big question in my mind as I worked on this is how she knew... about the stuff that she was including in the book that was related to life on Earth. Because... Oh.

I'll just say I do not believe she was receiving psychic communications from a band of famous dead people on Mars. Tracy, what? What? You doubt her word? I don't think that was what was going on. I don't have an explanation for what was going on. I believe that she believed that. And so then my question is just like, she seemed to have had at least a working knowledge of a number of 19th century scholars, naturalists, writers, and also Giordano Bruno, right?

And the Giordano Bruno part might make the most sense given that she had like a very religious upbringing. That might have been something that she came into contact with when she was only allowed to read religious works, even though he was a heretic. But she wasn't characterized as someone who was really like well or widely read. So I just have curiosity about what is your, you seem to have an idea. Where does that characterization come from?

It comes vaguely from her husband, mostly. So it could just be how he was positioning her. How does she know these things? She wasn't allowed to read these things. Right. Adolf, I have questions. The number of letters that passed between him and the psychical investigator, Hyslop, whatever his first name was, It was a number of letters that if I had been in Adolf's place, I would have been annoyed. Because reading through the whole exchange, it's like, oh, I have one more thing. Oh, you have one more thing. I have one more thing. And I'm just like, you are writing this man questions about his dead wife. And then asking more minutiae every time he answers you. And I was like, I would have found that a little bit irritating.

Maybe he wasn't. I mean, he seemed willing, though, to talk about her. Yeah. Is it like, do you get the same level of irritated if somebody sends you five texts when you haven't answered the first one? No, but I would get irritated if every time I answered someone's question, they didn't seem to find the answer satisfactory and wanted to ask more questions. Fair, fair. Maybe Hyslop was a little ADHD and he was like, oh, I forgot to do.

Now I've gone. I mean, I don't know. Supposition on my part, obviously. It also is one of those things that if they were in a room together, it might have been just a completely normal, non-annoying conversation. But the fact that it was playing out in letters back and forth made me go, okay, I would be a little irritated if this was me. But is that just because letters are more of an arduous thing now than they would have been considered then? I don't know. Well, because I think I would have a similar response if someone were emailing me and I answered with what I thought would be the final answer. And then I would get a reply that made it seem like that answer was unsatisfactory.

The last thing that I had noted as like just a thing to mention is When we did our episode on Edward Bulwer-Lytton, we didn't really talk much about his fiction in detail because that episode was more about his terrible relationship with his wife and her attempts to get out of that marriage. So, this is kind of speculation on my part because when I was reading through who all was in the spirit band, I was like, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, that seems odd when we're also talking about Charles Darwin and, you know, other naturalists and whatever. And it's the most logical reason for him to be part of the spirit band does seem to be this, you know, his works of fiction that seems thematically related to the spiritualist movement.

So one of these was a horror story called The Haunted and the Haunters, or The House and the Brain. Right. There was also one called A Strange Story that had an element of mesmerism in the plot and may have been an influence on the novel Dracula. And then there was Vril, The Power of the Coming Race, which was about a subterranean race discovered by an American explorer... that based on the brief summary I read, may have had an influence on theosophy, which means this was almost another guest appearance by frequent podcast poltergeist. That's not the word that I'm looking for. The specter that sometimes haunts the podcast.

Helena Blavatsky. It wouldn't be the Halloween season without a Madame Blavatsky arrival. Yeah. I am under the impression that Vril is also, like, it uses racist tropes in its descriptions of this race. But I have not read any of these books. But I thought it would be nice to say at least a little about what they were about if people were like, why would that guy be in the spirit band? Mostly what we talked about was him being a politician who was awful to his wife.

But also dabbled in sci-fi. Yes. Sort of proto-sci-fi occult horror writing. Love. Love. Yeah. I am pretty sure that Sarah Weiss is somebody that I stumbled across a mention of when I was looking for books written by people that might be unusual or interesting to talk about on the show and then said, this seems like a Halloween episode.

I will save it for October. Love. Love. And here we are. Yeah. Time for October. This episode did the thing that previous episodes have done where it puts a song in my head and won't let it stop, which is fine because I love this song. Oh, yeah? Which is Elvis Costello's Beyond Belief. Okay. Because there's a line in it. Just like the canals of Mars or the Great Barrier Reef, I come to you beyond belief. It's one of my favorite, favorite songs of all time, and I love it. So listen, I'll take any Elvis Costello song at any point in time. Yeah. I also had another, huh, that sounds familiar. I have not read Sarah Weiss's book. Right.

At all. But when we got to the part where we're talking about von Humboldt, her spirit guide, I don't know what to call him in any kind of real parlance, you know, discussing like the ways that humans have to be better and take care of one another, I was like, I would bet you $ 3 billion that Kurt Vonnegut read this. Oh.

Because it sounds so much like some of his writing. Yeah. So much like some of his writing. And I'm curious. I wonder if that's documented anywhere. So I would not be at all surprised if that was an influence. Yeah. I did not get the impression. I did not try to go find, like, hard sales numbers or anything. But I didn't get the impression that this book was enormously widely read. It is 600 pages long, and I did not read the whole 600 pages. But what I did read of it was kind of ponderous in places. And so I think that given the attitudes of the time, the things that people were excited about, the overlap with both Mars and the spiritualist movement, it might have been...

a bigger success had it not been 600 pages long. Yeah. Which there are plenty of long books that have become huge hits, but long and also dreary to read in places is just not an amazing combo for a bestseller most of the time. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm still thinking about Kurt Vonnegut because I'm like, oh, this is also a little bit of Like Shades of Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-Five. Oh, yeah.

Going to Tralfalmador. Uh-huh, uh-huh. Tralfalmador. I always do that one wrong. And I'm like, hmm. I have always said it in my head the way you just said it. I said it two different ways. Which one did you mean? The first one. Gotcha. The first way. Yeah, it came up in a discussion once I was talking with a friend of the show, Brian Young. You know, he did the Vonnegut episode with me that we had live. Was that last year? And then I remember us talking about it and me saying, I've been saying it wrong all this time. It's really this. And now I don't remember which is which because my brain has decided to stop recording information apparently at times. It's fine. It's fine. There are innumerable things that I learned to say by reading

them and later learned that I was not saying them correctly. Sometimes because they were sounded out and they are not pronounced the way they are spelled, but sometimes because I just misread the letters in them and came up with a different pronunciation, including letters that aren't actually there. Yeah.

I mean, I think we've all done that. I don't remember where I read it, somewhere on the internet at one point, it was probably on Twitter back in the day, that someone had pointed out, like, you know, when you encounter someone who is clearly very smart and educated and they mispronounce a word that you think is obvious and what that means is that they learned it by reading and there's no shame in that. And I was like, that's a great way to look at it. I've also had things that I learned from teachers who taught me the incorrect way to say things. Oh, yeah. I think we had a discussion about the French word for snow once, and I was like, that's not how you say that word.

We all have those, for sure. Yeah. We have definitely gotten emails about how we have pronounced Newfoundland when we pronounced it the way it is in... U.S. dictionaries and how when I was taught the provinces of Canada in school. It's not how we said it. Nope. Nope. Anyway, Sarah Weiss, interesting person. I wish we knew more about her life beyond this book and how much of the, oh, she never read, was just PR spin by her husband. And we talked about screaming skulls this week. We did that, yeah. Yeah.

I love these because they're sort of kooky and delightful. Yeah. Like I said, I didn't mean to laugh at the dead, but the whole, like, he doesn't like to be handled a lot. And he's fine if you're nice to him. And then if you do too much, he lets you know. And I'm like, I have a cat like that. Yeah. If you never make eye contact with him, he might come get on your lap. Maybe. Maybe. That'd be great.

Here's an interesting thing. I believe that Theophilus Brougham was maybe continuing a kooky family tradition in making bizarre requests of how his remains were to be handled. Mm-hmm. Because there's another Brougham in English history. As you'll recall, perhaps, from that episode, we mentioned that Theophilus is... one of the Warwick bromes. And there was another brome named Nicholas Brome in Warwick in... the early 1500s who died. I'm guessing they were related, but I didn't find a direct, like, family tree that put them together. Right. But I also, like, got a little fed up and didn't go down that rabbit hole a super long time. But Nicholas had his own kooky request. He might actually be a future episode,

but he came up because in looking for newspaper accounts about this, people were like, there was at least one or two that came up where they were like, this is like this other guy, but they don't necessarily, like, go so far as to say they're 100% related. But this one had done some things in his life. He apparently murdered a couple people. And as penance in his will, he wrote, I request that my body be buried within the parish church of Battlesley Clinton, where people may tread upon me when they come into the church. So he basically was trying to, like, prostrate himself and have people walk over him for eternity as a way to atone for his sins. And I'm like, is this a family thing?

Do you guys just talk about the weird ways she might be buried? But I also love it. Yeah. I also love it. It's just a little kooky. Yeah. Yeah. I didn't mention The Screaming Skull, the classic mid-20th century movie. Because it's so not the same thing as the... But in case anybody was like, hey, Holly, you like old weird horror movies? Why didn't you mention it? Just because it didn't. It would have been a weird detour and we could have done it, but I didn't feel like it.

That's all. That's the whole story. Okay. I kind of want to, I mean, come up with a way that I can, you know, make people think I'm haunting them after I'm gone. But I also want to be cremated. So this could be a problem. Yeah. Maybe I can imbue, at least in writing, some meaning to one of the many kooky toys I have. Uh-huh. And be like, if you don't treat this doll with respect, if you don't treat this Greedo action figure with respect, I'm gonna haunt you.

You'll come back and haunt everyone. I'm gonna haunt you. Yeah. And it won't be the fun kind of haunting. I'm not gonna make you cocktails. I'm not gonna hang out and giggle. Yeah. I don't know what I'd do, but. Mm-hmm. Silly things. Silly things. I like that we're into Halloween time. I can tell you that. Yeah. I was going through all the episodes that we were recording today and thinking these are pretty fun for the most part. Yeah. We have some good Halloweeners this year. Yeah. We have one coming up that I'm really excited about that involves candy discussion. Nice. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

We got some murder on deck. Yeah. We've got some fun, kooky things. Yeah. Who knows? And then I came across another thing. One of my friends was like, hey, you should do this. And I was like, ugh, it might have to be next year because I think I have plotted out all of October's doings that I was going to do. So we'll see. We'll see. It's another exhumation, but more of a grave robbing. And it was one that I came across when we were making Criminalia because we did a grave robbing season. And we didn't do an episode out of it for whatever reason. And I'm like, oh, yeah, that would actually be pretty fun to talk about because it's, you know, got some old Hollywood goodness and some wacky grave robin. My favorite. Yeah. I did not like some

of the ways that the second skull was talked about at the time in this episode. Oh, yeah. Because, like, somebody looking at the skull and going, oh... here are some negative traits associated with the skull. I'm a medical student. Like, that just feels super racist to me. That 100% sounds like, here are... traits about the skull that i think are bad and therefore it must have been and that like there's no evidence of any of that i have i haven't read the paper that eventually concluded that it was the skull of a woman or like what what criteria were used to make that determination well and that's an interesting thing to bring up because there are people today who are like that was the same thing Like they

didn't do DNA testing that anybody knows of. They didn't do any like scientific. They literally did the same thing of like an examination. Yeah. There are incredible things that you can figure out about skulls nowadays. Oh, yeah. Including like studying the isotopes. in there to figure out where a person actually grew up. But like, I don't know what kind of assessment was made, but like it adds a weird layer to a story that had come along with this murder discussion and we don't know whether it's the victim or the perpetrator and then also a medical student was like, oh, this is what I think this person's skull was. Well, there's like a lot of a lot of one there's a lot of made up stuff like people are just making up lore about the skull

and two you know when it comes to that medical student they knew about the skull and they were going hoping to look at it so I feel like it's just a bunch of confirmation bias on his part oh sure sure like at no point was he really entertaining the idea that the skull was anything else yeah he's like yes yes yes yes of course But also, we don't know if that narrative's even real. We don't know who Miss Garnett was. Yeah. Or who this mystery medical student was. So there's so much haziness around that particular one. Right.

You know, it's all a mess. It's all a mess. That's what it is. Don't get me wrong. I love it. I love a mess. But also, I love, like, it's just a great piece of evidence of the way people just want to believe stuff, right? Like, even Judge Udall goes, and he goes through all the family records on Nevis, and he's reading up. But even he is like, and I'm going to make a big jump of logic to, like, make these two pieces of information I have match up in a way that seems to align with the previously established lore that isn't... in any way verifiable either. It's just one problem after another. And because when you look at it and they're like, there is the idea that, you know, Azariah Penny somehow had... I mean, if you

go by the original story that often gets told that he had somehow brought a person back with him from the Caribbean, but then that isn't supported by the documentation on Nevis... But people still repeat that version of the story. Like the timeline is just messy as heck. There's just, you know, the whole thing is a big gobbledygook of like, we wanted to make up a scary and wacky story.

I don't know. Yeah. Like, oh, bless your hearts. But yes, it is inherently racist to presume that you can look at a skull and know what race the person was. Yeah. Unless you're dealing with some sort of skull that evidences manipulation that's done in specific cultures. Oh, sure. Yeah. Other than that, there's not really a way. I just wanted to make sure we caveated that in case somebody went, no, there are some ways. No. I'm reminded of the whole pseudoscience of phrenology and... Man, phrenology just... Yeah. Yeah. Phrenology pops up in places. And in fact, not in an episode that we're doing soon, but I might mention it behind the scenes. There was a phrenology jump scare in the research. Oh, no. Yeah. But it was so minor.

It had no impact on the story we're telling. And I was just like, whatever. We may mention this later. Yeah. We've talked in a couple of past episodes about the people that developed whole collections of skulls to try to make arguments about racial worth basically and yeah so anyway made me feel yucky big fibby arguments anyway listen if this is your weekend coming up I hope you don't get haunted by a skull screaming or otherwise or maybe I hope you do it's Halloween season if you're into it go for it I hope that your whatever ghosts may visit you are are peaceful and cool or they just want to hang out and have a have a giggle I don't know whatever works is great If you have time off this weekend, I also hope that you

are taking care of yourself. You're doing something restful and restorative, whatever that is. You don't have to be ambitious. You just sit on your couch and watch cartoons. That sounds great to me. If you have obligations, if you got to, you know, run errands, get groceries, mow the lawn, ferry people around to their various activities, etc. I still hope that you steal a little time. To just be chill and quiet with yourself or do whatever it is that delights you. Maybe getting on a roller coaster. I don't know.

I'm not the boss of you. That's the beauty of it. But I hope it's a great weekend. I hope everyone takes care of each other and that we all remember to be kind. We will be right back here on Monday with a brand new episode. We will also be back here tomorrow with a classic. Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Behind the Scenes Minis: Martian Skulls

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