SYMHC Classics: Original Six Impossible Episodes

0:02 Happy Saturday. Today is the anniversary of the London Beer Flood, which happened on October 17th, 1814. It is one of the things we talked about in our first ever installment of our recurring series, Six Impossible Episodes. So we are bringing that episode out as today's Saturday classic. This episode also includes a couple of topics that fit in with our typical October episodes, Edward Mordrake and Robert the Haunted Doll.

0:30 This episode originally came out February 4th, 2015. Enjoy! Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And I'm Holly Frey. Over the last couple of years that Holly and I have been on this show, we have gotten literally hundreds and hundreds of requests from listeners.

1:00 And maybe 5% of them are requests that we get over and over and over and over again. And unfortunately, a handful of those most requested episodes are also ones that we can't really do a whole show on. Sometimes there's just not enough information available about the thing. Sometimes the information exists somewhere, but there's not a way that we can really get to it. It's either not in a language that we speak, Or it's so spread out among so many different things that it would take way more time than we can really put into a show that puts out two new episodes in a week. Or sometimes there's information, but it's so far removed from primary sources that it just doesn't feel that reliable. Occasionally, we

1:51 actually get emails from people who kind of go, I want you to do an episode on this. I know the information is out there because my friend is doing his master's thesis on it. And I'm just going to go ahead and put it out there. We cannot do a master's thesis level of work for a podcast that comes out twice a week. We would be on like a Dan Carlin hardcore history kind of schedule if that were the time that we could put into every episode.

2:14 So what we're going to do today is to take six of these things that are impossible to do an episode on their own. And we're going to just run through them in one show. So that is our six impossible episodes for today. So first up, we're going to talk about Mary Fields, who is also known as Stagecoach Mary.

2:33 And this is a person who a lot of people hear about for the first time through a post on Badass of the Week, which if you're not familiar with that site, the language is a bit blue. So maybe do not Google it after this episode and read it aloud to an elementary school class or other small children, etc., Here's what we do know about stagecoach Mary. She was born a slave in Tennessee in 1832 and was owned by a family called the Dunns. She and one of the Dunns' daughters, Dolly, basically grew up together, and Mary learned to read and write while she was still a slave.

3:08 After slavery was abolished, she moved to Toledo, Ohio with Dolly Dunn, who was going there to become a nun. Dolly Dunn became known as Mother Amadeus, and she eventually moved to Cascade, Montana, to teach at a school for Native American children. For a while, Mary stayed behind in Ohio, but when Mother Amadeus became extremely ill, they sent for her.

3:32 Mother Amadeus eventually got better, and Mary stayed in Cascade. She did odd jobs around St. Peter's Mission, and she basically acted as a protector for the nuns. She also got a job delivering the mail by stagecoach, which made her the first African-American woman to work delivering U.S. mail. And we talk in our Charlie Parkhurst episode about what a demanding and dangerous job stagecoach driving was. And Mary apparently took to it tremendously. She was extremely reliable as a driver, and she developed a reputation for fighting, brawling, and taking guff from absolutely no one. There are a number of stories of her knocking men out with one blow under a variety of circumstances, and this is also

4:15 why she wound up not working for the convent anymore. It was the combination of her personality and her work that earned her that nickname Stagecoach Mary. Eventually, she retired from stagecoach driving and opened a laundry, and she became a really beloved figure in Cascade, which actually made her birthday a holiday. And stagecoach Mary died in 1914. She was 82 at the time, and she is buried just outside Cascade, Montana. In terms of information about her, there's a children's book about her, as well as a documentary called Discovering Mary, and that's by a woman named Joyce Fitzpatrick.

4:53 I haven't seen the film itself, but she talks about picking up tidbits of information for years before making the film. And the film itself actually started out more as a documentary of her recording her own process of looking for more information about Mary Fields. So when people first started asking us to do an episode about Stagecoach Mary, there was actually a crowdfunding project in the works. somewhere about a documentary. I'm not sure if it was this documentary or a different one. But now, almost two years later, when I went looking for it again, all traces of that have vanished into the ether. So at the time, I was like, hey, when this documentary comes out, maybe we will be able to get enough to do a

5:38 whole episode on this person. And it evaporated. I don't know what happened to it. So if it does come out, there's always still the possibility. We'll see. But next up in our Impossible episodes is the London Beer Flood. And you may remember the episode in our archive about the Boston Molasses Flood, which was back in the era of Katie and Sarah. And in 1915, a vat in Boston's North End burst, sending a 15-foot wave of molasses that ripped buildings off their foundations and killed more than 20 people and also injured another 150. So the London beer flood was a lot like that, except that it was beer and it was about 100 years earlier. And it's also, we have a similar amount of information about it as

6:26 about the Boston molasses flood, except that episode on the Boston molasses flood is from back when the podcast was only 15 minutes long. Yeah, there was a lot less fleshing out of all of the details at that point. And so for the London beer flood on October 17th of 1814, A three-story tall beer vat of fermenting beer broke at a brewery and it unleashed a 15-foot high wave of porter. And as the wave roared through the brewery, it broke taps off other vats, which caused a chain reaction that then flooded the surrounding area with beer. Some sources report this having happened at the Horseshoe Brewery on Tottenham Court Road. And other sources say it was the Mr's Henry Mew and Company on Bainbridge Street. So to

7:14 kind of solve that mystery, those two streets intersect with each other. And the second, the Mew brothers bought the brewery in 1841. So this was sort of two different ways of describing the same brewery. And eight people were killed in the beer flood, and many buildings were destroyed. There was no drainage in the streets, so the beer basically had nowhere to go except through people's homes. So it just went right into them and right through them.

7:41 And two of those people that were killed were a mother and daughter who were having tea in their home and then were swept away. Five more were a family who had been killed in their basement while they were in the process of mourning their two-year-old child who had just died. A brick wall collapsed and killed another woman named Eleanor Cooper. There was an inquest after this happened.

8:03 One of the hoops holding the vat together had actually broken and slipped off earlier in the day, but apparently this wasn't a really unusual occurrence. It happens sometimes, and they would go and fix it. When George Crick, who was a 17-year employee of the brewery, reported the incident to his boss, he was told that it would not be a problem, and he was instructed to delegate replacing the hoop to a different employee. The inquest determined that this was an act of God, and the brewery was cleared of all wrongdoing. There were no restitutions paid, and actually the taxes that the brewery had previously paid on the beer that it was brewing were waived. One of the long-standing rumors about this flood is that people rushed

8:46 to the streets with pots and pans to try to get free beer. This is almost certainly false and probably stems from an effort to sort of insult the people living there because many of them were Irish. The brewery did eventually resume operations, but then it closed in 1921. The 200th anniversary of the London beer flood was in 2014, and at that point there was this just huge number of articles that came out about it and I was really hopeful at that point that hey we'll have enough information to do a whole episode now but all the articles basically said the facts that we just told you there wasn't a lot of additional information that came out around the 200th anniversary So the middle part of this

9:29 episode is going to cover two subjects that have brought on a load of requests, but they are really, really difficult to substantiate. So before we dive into those, Tracy, do you want to pause for a word from a sponsor? Let's do that. All righty. Music We've gotten several requests to talk about Edward Mordrake, and we got a lot more after he was a character in the most recent season.

10:00 of American Horror Story. But if you take all the supposedly out of Edward Mordrake's story, there's not a lot of words left in it. So what we do know, supposedly, is that Edward Mordrake was the son of an upper class or noble family in England. And he's said to have been rather a good-looking man. except for the fact that he had a second face on the back of his head. The most lengthy documentation we have of this is from Curiosities of Medicine, being an encyclopedic collection of rare and extraordinary cases and the most striking instances of abnormality in all branches of medicine and surgery, derived from an exhaustive research of medical literature from its origin to the present day, abstracted, classified, annotated, and indexed. And that

10:49 is by George M. Gould and Walter L. Pyle, and that came out at about 1896. So that entry goes, The following well-known story of Edward Mordrake, though taken from lay sources, is of sufficient notoriety and interest to be mentioned here. Quote, One of the weirdest as well as most melancholy stories of human deformity is that of Edward Mordrake, said to have been heir to one of the noblest peerages in England. He never claimed the title, however, and committed suicide in his 23rd year. He lived in complete seclusion, refusing the visits even of the members of his own family.

11:24 He was a young man of fine attainments, a profound scholar, and a musician of rare ability. His figure was remarkable for its grace, and his face, that is to say, his natural face, was that of an antinous. But upon the back of his head was another face, that of a beautiful girl, lovely as a dream, hideous as a devil.

11:46 The female face was a mere mask, occupying only a small portion of the posterior part of the skull, yet exhibiting every sign of intelligence, of a malignant sort, however. It would be seen to smile and sneer while Mordrake was weeping. The eyes would follow the movements of the spectator, and the lips would gibber without ceasing. No voice was audible, but Mordrake aversed that he was kept from his rest at night by the hateful whispers of his devil twin, as he called it, which never sleeps but talks to me forever of such things as they only speak of in hell. No imagination can conceive the dreadful temptations it sets before me. For some unforgiven wickedness of my forefathers, I am knit to this fiend, for a fiend it

12:29 surely is. I beg and beseech you to crush it out of human semblance, even if I die for it. Such were the words of the hapless Mordrake to Manvers and Treadwell, his physicians. In spite of careful watching, he managed to procure poison whereof he died, leaving a letter requesting that the demon face might be destroyed before his burial, quote, lest it continues its dreadful whisperings in my grave. At his own request, he was interred in a waste place without stone or legend to mark his grave. And we wanted to point out that, uh, there are variations on spelling.

13:04 So if you go look at this, this is a transcription, uh, in, in this particular one that we read, they leave the R out of Mordrake. So it's Mordake. So you may see it either way. If you go looking like it show notes or whatnot. Yeah. So, uh, there are a number of conditions that can cause someone to appear to have a second face or like remnants of facial structures. Um, But what these two doctors, they were really doctors, the guys who wrote this book, what they are reporting is something that this guy supposedly said to two different physicians.

13:44 And it all sounds, the tone is more like rumor than actual medical evidence. Yeah. The whole thing goes into the probably apocryphal category. There's just not, there's no real documentation. And it's very convenient that He says he was buried with no stone or no marker. Like, we have no way to prove that this person ever actually existed, because all we have to go on is this third-party account. Yeah, it's such a compelling story, and I know people love it, but it also, when you kind of break it down, it reads like a checklist of all of the vital elements of any sort of juicy rumor story. Like it's, you can't substantiate it. And the details are baked into the story that you can't substantiate it. Like, no, and

14:32 he will never be found because he didn't want to be found. So his grave is unmarked. And no, his doctors told us, but we don't really know those doctors. And so it's all, it's not going to happen. Our next story is similarly a story that people really, really love a whole lot. That we've gotten a lot of requests for. A lot of them come in around Halloween, but they come in through the rest of the year also.

14:55 And these are for Robert the Haunted Doll, who is sometimes also called Robert the Enchanted Doll. And in the words of the Key West Art and Historical Society, quote, Robert is a one-of-a-kind handmade doll created around the turn of the 20th century. Standing 40 inches tall and stuffed with wood wool known as excelsior, he is dressed in a sailor suit and once bore painted features... not unlike those of a jester. So, just to be pretty upfront, this thing looks creepy. The paint is worn off of its face, so it has creepy flat black eyes, and the nose and mouth are sort of hard to define from the rest of the face. It's got this wooden head that's also got some pitting in it, so the whole thing is a little bit unsettling and unnerving to behold. Yeah,

15:45 I think a lot of people find old dolls creepy in general. Oh, yeah. This is a very old doll. And then it has this creepy story to go along with it. Robert was a gift given to a little boy named Robert Eugene Otto, who later became known as Gene rather than Robert. And it was given to him when he was four years old. This was in 1904.

16:05 And it's a little, there are different accounts of exactly who gave it to him. The original origin in all the stories is the Bahamas, but it's not quite clear whether it was the maid who was from the Bahamas or if it was the maid's daughter, because some people report that it was a little girl. Either way, the doll is about the same size as Gene himself was at the time, and Gene named the doll Robert after himself.

16:33 Gene also gave Robert his own room in the attic with his own toys, and he eventually started blaming this doll for his own misbehavior. Eventually, Robert took the blame for anything unwelcome that happened to Gene. And along the way, other people who were not Jean started reporting weird things about the doll. People looking through the window from the street said that they would see it move from one side of the attic turret to another. People inside the house said that they could hear it walking around and giggling above them while they were downstairs. And some people even said that they saw the doll's expression change as though it was listening to their conversations. Gene eventually became

17:15 an artist. You know, he grew up and he married. And his wife is reported to have hated the doll and demanded that it be locked in a chest. Eventually, after both Gene and his wife died, their home was made into the Artist House Hotel. Myrtle Reuter, who bought the home in 1974, donated the doll to the East Martello Museum 20 years later. And the doll is on display at the museum, which is an old fort. And the doll also has its bear with him. Museum staff reported that security cameras and other electronics often failed around the doll. Museum patrons have written him letters of apology after taking his photograph without having permission, and then they would experience bad luck later. All of this sounds pretty underwhelming,

17:59 considering that a lot of the blog posts that you find about Robert describe the doll as evil or possessed or the most haunted doll in history. Uh, Those kinds of posts aren't generally the sorts of things we can use as sources for the podcast. And what we do know about the doll, for sure, is that it's a doll and it creeps people out. And I will admit that I, though, am still a little nervous talking about Robert without his permission. Really? I hope nothing bad befalls us.

18:27 That sort of makes me chuckle because usually I'm the more superstitious of the two of us and I don't have it for this one. Well... Ghost stories scare me, even though I would call myself generally skeptical about such things. Interesting. We've all learned a little about Tracy today. Before we get to the next two stories that are particularly wacky, do you want to take another word from a sponsor? Sure. Sweet.

19:03 To get back to our Last two impossible episodes. These are also hard to substantiate, but they're not nearly as paranormal in their origin as the two that we had before the break. We're going to start first with the Lost Army of Cambyses. And this actually was a really welcome suggestion the first time that we got it because I had been looking for some interesting ancient history to talk about. And so I got this and I was very excited. And then as soon as I looked into it, I went, that's not going to work. Greek historian Herodotus wrote about Cambyses II sending an army of 50,000 soldiers on a mission to destroy the Oracle of Ammon. And this is the same Oracle that Alexander the Great later visited.

19:44 He did that in the year 332 BCE after this visit happened. Alexander the Great reportedly started to think of himself as the son of Amun. And this particular event purportedly happened almost 200 years prior to Alexander's visit. The oracle had refused to recognize Cambyses as sovereign over Egypt, so Cambyses sent an army out from Thebes to the oasis of Siwa, where the Temple of Amun was located, to destroy the oracle. But the army never arrived. So here's what Herodotus had to say about that. As for those who were sent to march against the Ammonians as they set out and journeyed from Thebes with guides... And it is known that they came to the city of Oasis, inhabited by the Samians, said to be of the Ascrionian tribe,

20:34 seven days' march from Thebes across sandy desert. This place is called, in the Greek language, Islands of the Blessed. Thus far it is said the army came. After that, except for the Ammonians themselves and those who heard from them, no man can say anything of them, for they neither reached the Ammonians nor returned back. But this is what the Ammonians themselves say. that when Persians were crossing the sand from Oasis, probably the oasis of Karge, to attack them, and were about midway between their country and Oasis, while they were breakfasting, a great and violent south wind arose which buried them in the masses of sand which it bore, and so they disappeared from sight. Such is the Ammonian

21:16 tale of this army. And that's most of what we know about it. A sandstorm buried an army. Maybe. But a lot of historians think the whole thing is completely apocryphal. Every once in a while, researchers will find, in scare quotes, the army. Usually what they have found is some shards of pottery and some bones. Some of these finds are outright hoaxes, and others have been a little more substantive, like there really is pottery and there really are bones.

21:49 But often the research itself is still questionable in some way, like people have gone and done their searching without actually getting permission to be in Egypt in the first place. And then they've presented findings as a documentary film rather than through the typical channels that you announce academic findings, like through a journal that is subject to peer review.

22:12 Lastly on our list of six impossible episodes is Julie d'Aubigny, a.k.a. La Maupin. We get a lot of requests for her. She's portrayed as a swashbuckling, cross-dressing, bisexual opera singer with romantic adventures to rival Casanova's. Which is pretty exciting. Lots of the more recent requests are also accompanied with a link to the post that was written about her at the Rejected Princesses blog. Here is a snippet of her entry in Curiosities of Biography or Memoirs of Wonderful and Extraordinary Characters, which came out in 1845. This female, who acquired extraordinary celebrity as a singer in France in the 17th century, was one of the numerous instances in which a stage heroine, fortified by public favor and presuming on

23:05 the magic of a melodious voice, defied the laws and institutions of a country by which she was supported, and committed, with impunity, crimes which would have doomed a common, unaccomplished desperado, an ignominious death. This romantic and indecorous adventurer, who dressed, fought, made love, and conquered like a man, having been married at an early age, fortunately for her husband, Monsieur Maupin, quitted him a few months after their nuptials for the superior attractions of a fencing master, a weapon which she afterwards handled with destructive dexterity against many antagonists. While today's accounts of her tend to talk about her escapades pretty gleefully, earlier retellings are unsurprisingly a bit less glowing. And this

23:52 particular account goes on to describe her wooing a young lady and then, when that young lady had second thoughts, burning down her house, which is where Lama Pan was staying, abducting her and then holding her captive until they were discovered. The trouble with an episode on Lama Pan is that even the accounts of her from that time that she lived, which was roughly 1670 to 1707, really read a lot more like rumor than a factual account. And while there are a couple of thorough-looking blog posts about her, some of them are quite lengthy, mostly they are sourced in kind of bits and pieces from introductions, footnotes, and asides in other works. There's at least one novel about her, but we can't use fiction as a source for our

24:39 history podcast because history and fiction are two different things, sort of. I mean, you could make an argument that all history is in some way fictitious, but A novel is not a source that we could use about someone's life. Yeah, since novels really generally make no assertion of historical accuracy, like they're not held to that same standard, it's just not a viable source to use. You can mention it.

25:05 We've mentioned it in other episodes where we go, oh, there's this novel about it and there's some interesting info that may or may not be true, but we can't really use it as a primary source. No, unless we're... Unless our episode is about the person who wrote the novel. Right. Then it totally is relevant. And absolutely no shade to Rejected Princesses in that assessment. Like, Rejected Princesses is awesome.

25:26 I love that blog. Me too. But for our purposes, we need a little bit fewer layers of according to so-and-so between us and the subject before we can really talk about it really well. Yeah. We get so many requests about her that are just like, oh, I love her. She sounds awesome. Doesn't she sound awesome? You should do an episode on her. She sounds awesome. And I'm like, she does sound awesome. Sounds super awesome. She sounds super awesome.

25:53 But I can't really build a podcast episode on a blog post that is sourcing footnotes of other books that I can't go and read for myself for various reasons. Yeah. So those are six things that we get requests for all the time. but are impossible to do whole episodes on, at least at this point. Yeah, so hopefully this gave you a little bit of satisfaction, those of you that are yearning for those episodes. I hope so. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note, our email address is historypodcast at iheartradio.com. And you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.