Transcript of July Bonus Episode: Digging Into Exhumed with Aaron Mahnke

Hey weirdos, I'm Ash.

I'm Elena.

And I'm Aaron.

And this is Morbid.

A very special Morbid.

A special Morbid. Welcome, Aaron.

Thank you for having me.

Thank you for coming. Weirdos, today we have Aaron Menke on the show. You probably know him from his award-winning podcast Lore, or perhaps the author of some of your favorite titles. Uh, and we have exciting news. Your latest book, Exhumed, comes out August 4th.

It does.

So soon.

So soon.

So soon. Too soon.

Congratulations. Thank you.

Thank you.

You're welcome.

This book is amazing. I got an early copy of it. I feel very fortunate.

Yeah, you're on, um, you're on the back.

Oh, that's so cool. I didn't even know that.

Right, right at the top.

Oh, look at me!

Look at that. Look at me!

You're on there with Amy Bruni.

Oh, hell yeah.

From Kindred Spirits and Ghost Hunters. And Josh Gates.

Oh, shit. Oh, shit.

Cool.

Good company.

Good company.

I feel good about that.

At the very top.

Oh, look at me.

Look at you, Big Red. I love it.

It's an amazing book. It is like lore on crack. Like, it is so much information that is so interesting. It had like— my husband started reading it and he was like, this is amazing.

I stole it at one point.

Yeah, it's phenomenal.

Thank you.

So good.

So years ago, a couple years after I started Lore, I created a podcast called Unobscured. And the idea was, you know, we spent 30 minutes on a topic on Lore, but what if we spent a whole season on the topic? And the first season is on the Salem Witch Trials, which still people listen to like every year. They get questions about it all the time. It was 10 episodes. You know, like 45 minutes apiece. And there was so much fun in spending just all that time exploring a big, complex topic. Like, you can really take your time and dig deep. You can build a house, right? You can take your time. And we did 4 seasons of that, and then iHeart canceled it. But Exhumed, in some ways, is sort of like a 5th season. You know, it is 20 lore episodes.

It feels like that.

It is, yeah.

That's why I loved it. It was, like, very homey. I was like, ooh, I'm ready for this. It's cozy.

Yeah, it's like a good read for like a thunderstorm, you know? That's the vibe of it.

Yeah, yeah. And I like to approach my writing style for things like this as a little bit more lighthearted, and I don't want people to get bogged down in technicality, right?

No.

While at the same time there is some teaching that has to go on in the book, and we can, we can explore that.

Yeah. And you know, when you say that, that is what I noticed immediately about the writing style, is it doesn't bog you down with all these like technical things, but it's giving you the information. But I felt like you were talking to me about it.

Yeah.

Because you have like a little aside where you'll be like, right, Like, you know what I mean? Like, it felt very comfortable to read.

And there's a few dad jokes. I apologize. Maybe some puns.

You gotta throw in the dad jokes where you can.

Yeah, yeah, I expect it.

It's my right.

Yes, absolutely it is. So in Exhumed, you examine the Mercy Brown case, but that's not all. It also really examines like the attitudes about life and death that led up to and continued after that that case. You've been asking on Lore the question "why" for a long time. What was the thing that made you want to explore it so deeply here?

Well, Mercy Brown was the very first episode of Lore, so we're talking March of 2015.

Yeah.

You know, almost 12 years ago. Yeah. I probably wrote it about 12 years ago this coming November.

Oh, wow. Wow.

And at the time, it was a— It was a cool, creepy story. Yeah, that's really all that it was.

And it's local.

Hey folks, have you ever heard of this before? Let me tell you about this, right? And you know, and I, I built that episode, it was only like 12 minutes long because I was still trying to get my feet on the ground. Like, what is this format even supposed to be? So there's a little bit of vampire and premature burial, some safety coffin stuff in there, but it's mostly about Mercy Brown.

Yeah.

And when I wrote and told the story in the podcast, I thought folks just need to hear this wild story. But then what happened is I kept making lore. And as the years went by, I would write and publish another episode and think, you know, that kind of— this sounds weird— that kind of smells like the Mercy Brown story. There's some aspect of it that— it's almost like it's from the same family. I wonder why I feel like those are connected. And I like puzzles. I like riddles. I grew up playing games like Myst in the '90s. Myst.

Holy shit.

Oh, my gosh. So it's like you have to pay attention to sounds you heard in one scene, and then you're using them as a code somewhere else.

Oh my God.

And I was just filing away certain episodes as I went through making lore. And I thought, oh, this really does feel like it might have some bearing on the Mercy Brown story. And I just kind of gathered those pieces together. And at some point a couple of years ago, I realized this is a book. I need to write about it.

Hell yeah.

And so the idea was, yes, we've got the Mercy Brown story, and I can tell it. Actually, I tell it in the very beginning, kind of in the format that people typically bump into it with errors and all. And then at the end of the book, the last 20% is really covering Mercy's story. But that first 80% of the book is all those other stories that I bumped into along the way that help explain the why. Like you said, why was it— why was it thought that what they did to her post-death was an okay, acceptable thing to do?

How was that a valid question?

Valid question.

Valid question. Why did they think, okay, let's do that? You know?

Right.

It really works too. In the book because like you said, it begins with her and ends with her. And when you eat up all that in the middle, when you get back to her, you're like, oh, okay. Like, it does make— you're like, oh shit, okay, this doesn't seem as crazy when you put it in the context of all this other stuff.

Exactly.

You know, once you talk about talking blood, it's like, oh yeah, that's not weird.

I wouldn't want to talk about talking. There's a lot of blood in the book, actually.

There is a lot of blood.

I'm a metaphor guy, and I tend to tell people that, look, when we talk about context, What you're talking about is like 3D glasses at the movie theater. You know, if you watch the movie without them, it's gonna look a little weird. You're not gonna get the whole picture.

I just find it funny. Oh, that is a good way of explaining it.

But when you put the 3D glasses on, all of a sudden, like, things are moving at you and you really get a sense for what's going on. That's what context does to a story, whether it's fiction or it's a historical exploration like this. So for me, I had to equip people So that, yes, by the time they get to that last section of the book, oh my gosh, I have all the tools in my backpack that I need to go through this mission. I can do this now.

Yeah. It lets you appreciate the story more.

It does.

Because you can like weirdly sympathize with other people in the story.

And that was one of the surprising things about it. As I wrote it, I realized, oh, they aren't like dumb barbaric people.

Yeah.

Right? Like you—

'Cause it could come off that way at first when you hear that story.

It could, yeah, definitely. Absolutely. Villagers cut open a dead woman's chest and burn her heart.

Yeah, what the hell's that about?

Right, what is that? It sounds barbaric, but when you actually dig into it, it's really human.

Yeah, absolutely it is, which is so scary.

Yeah.

Now, speaking of that, the monsters and things that people believe in often tell us a lot more about people than they do about the monsters. Absolutely, yeah. What do you think vampires and the panic around them reveals about the fears of people in 19th century New England?

Well, they were dealing with a lot of disease. You know, at the time, tuberculosis was— it had been a thing for a very long time, but there's just something about, you know, late 19th century that TB was really just having fun out there.

Everything was just gross.

Living its life, full-chested, right?

Yeah.

And so there's this idea that there's this invisible thing that's robbing their loved ones from them, robbing their livelihood in some ways. It's funny, like just a few years before, maybe it was a few months before, Mercy's mother died in the early 1880s. They had actually figured out what was causing TB scientifically, but that was in Europe. And it was, you know, it was like a world away from this farming village outside of Newport in Rhode Island.

They didn't get the CNN update.

They did not get that. There was no alert on their phone to follow.

BBC wasn't just coming up.

Yeah, so there's like this, It's like having a phone call with somebody and there's like a massive delay and they just didn't know. Even by the time Mercy passed away in early 1892, they really weren't putting the pieces together. And at the same time, even if you explain it to them, what they were being told is there's this invisible thing that is making you sick. And at the end of the day, that's— Yeah, but it also sounds a lot like what they thought a vampire was doing or this supernatural force. It is an invisible thing that is, sucking the life out of them, just in a different way.

Yeah, a little more scientific, you know?

Yeah, yeah, that makes more sense. I feel like a vampire is way more fun.

It's also more fun. I'd rather go at the hands of a vampire than TB.

Yeah, yeah, you know, I would have fallen victim to this whole vampire panic, just— I think I would have wanted for the fun of it, like, I think I would have chose to. Yeah, even if I was like, yeah, it's probably science for the theater. Yeah, just for the theater of it all.

The, the historian and the writer in me wants to say that Like, she was the end, she was the end of like a century of stories like hers. Back to the 1790s with Sarah Tillinghast, also in Exeter, Rhode Island, by the way.

Oh, really?

Bookended by this little village in Rhode Island. And then they were in between, they were all over, you know, Vermont, New Hampshire, everywhere. And we call it the New England Vampire Panic, but there's not a lot of evidence that people were out there at that moment saying so-and-so's a vampire. What they were saying was one of the people in the grave who died before the sick person who is currently dying is somehow sucking the life out of people.

What is that?

And we, and we know that the word vampire has a history of like appearing on the public record, but we also like almost immediately see it being used as a metaphor. And I talk about this in the book, like you'll see it in newspapers being used as a metaphor for politicians, for you know, uh, was it Oliver Wendell Holmes used the word vampire to talk about women, which was like the most sexist thing. I hope his wife gave him hell for that. But, um, it was being used as a metaphor, and you can't have a metaphor unless people understand what the word is supposed to mean. Yeah. So there, there is the assumption that it was floating around outside of print long before, um, but there's, there's really no record of It was kind of imprinted on Mercy's story by an outside newspaper when you first see the word vampire show up. To them, it was just sort of like, "There's something supernatural going on." Yeah.

There's something sucking the life out of people.

Exactly.

Like a bloodsucker. Yeah. Great. Or in True Blood, a fanger.

A fanger, yeah.

Fanger.

So, just in the book as a whole, was there a chapter that challenged a belief you held previously? Just kind of rocked your world a little bit? When you researched it?

I, that's a good question. The hardest chapter to write was probably the one that was all the philosophy about the human soul.

Mm, I love that.

That must be fascinating.

Yeah, it did challenge a lot of like preconceived notions I had going in, which was, oh, they always assumed it was in the heart, you know, that kind of thing. And you know, they did cut out Mercy's heart, so I'm gonna find that. But what I found instead was that it was just everywhere.

I was gonna say, so much more complicated.

Yeah, different cultures had different ideas. Same cultures, went through multiple ideas. Some cultures, there were multiple souls. Like in Egypt, it was, you know, at the very minimum, 9 different souls that had different functions.

That's wild.

Yeah, so that one really, it was hard to write too, just from a philosophical standpoint. Like I can explain creepy history and some science, but we get into the realm of the soul and what is the difference between each of these 9?

It gets a little murky.

Yes, yeah, it takes a lot out of you.

Yeah.

Jenn has several souls.

I have a lot of souls.

She'll slip into an accent sometimes and we're like, was that a soul? That just happened.

It might happen today.

Yeah.

So just know it's a soul.

Yeah. You know, just to know she's got a few. Yeah.

I have to say one of my favorite chapters in the book was corpse medicine because we covered that pretty recently.

Yeah.

And I fell down so many different rabbit holes with that.

Oh, it's so fascinating.

What was the most absurd medical practice that you came across in your research?

Absurd. Well, so—

It's all pretty absurd.

Yeah, it's all pretty absurd. I mean, we can get into blood later, but I think about the English king, was it Charles II, who had the drops that he carried with him? Yes, the King's Drops. The King's Drops.

Yeah.

And in the firsthand accounts of people who had consumed them and what it was doing to them, and then you realize that the two main ingredients were like, high-proof alcohol and opium.

They were just fucked up.

They were wasted.

And every time he felt like a twinge of pain, he was going for multiple drops. Just give me the whole bottle.

Just drinking them out of skulls too.

So no wonder it worked, right? Works in air quotes.

For a little.

Yes, exactly. You throw enough opium in anything, it's gonna numb out something.

That'll hold you over for some time. In the end, I think he ended up dying of seizures, right?

Maybe?

I think he did.

I don't remember.

After long-term use of these drugs.

I would assume.

He was also a hobby alchemist. And at that time, alchemists in general tended to work a lot with mercury and like boiling it and creating vapors from it. And so they just consumed so many toxic chemicals. I mean, Isaac Newton was gray, I think in his 30s. Wow. When some of his journals went up for auction back in the '90s, I think it was in the '90s or the '80s, they opened up one of the books and found strands of his hair in there and they had them tested and their mercury levels were off the charts.

Oh my God.

It's crazy.

It's no wonder he couldn't eat. He had digestive issues and died young.

Oh my God, mercury will mess you up. We just talked about that at our live show. It's called the Mad Hatter, Madison Hatter. That comes from them being poisoned by the vapors from mercury.

Yeah, exactly.

That's crazy.

Yeah, that's nuts. Yeah, that's— I think that's what happened in that podcast, um, S-Town. Do you remember that podcast?

I do. I haven't finished it.

Mercury, I think it was. It was some kind of poisoning like that. Okay, that made some shit go down.

I'm actually kind of surprised that I haven't got mercury poisoning because I love sushi.

So you do? I'm actually surprised you've never got it.

Yeah, I know, you love the sea. Fingers crossed. Yeah, but I don't.

It's one of those things that we look back now and we say Yeah. Oh my gosh, what were you thinking? It's like a liquid metal.

I know.

Did you not notice people dying from that?

Right, but it's like radium too.

Like, in 100 years, are people going to be looking at us and saying, chemotherapy? Are you kidding me?

Probably.

You poison the body to the point of death to kill cancer? What were you thinking?

Like, what were you thinking?

Or like, hey, holding your phone 24/7, what's that doing to your body?

Having it in your pocket next to your vital organs? Like, putting it in your, your bed next to your face?

Like, but they didn't know better. Yeah, right. You know, they just didn't know anything. Yeah.

And we don't—

the worst part is we kind of know better.

I know, we do know a little.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But more will come out, I'm sure.

Yeah, sure. Well, they'll find out how stupid we are later. It's just—

it's the next generation's thing.

Yeah, it'll be— they'll deal with it. Yeah, yeah. Now, another, um, chapter that I really loved was the Hand of Glory. Oh my gosh, I love the Hand of Glory.

It's a wild concept.

It's so crazy.

For people who love to accessorize, that's— yeah, truly.

And I do. Yeah, I do.

And I do, I do love it. Now, for people who are listening who don't— are like, a Hand hand of glory. Can you give us a little synopsis of what it is?

Oh, definitely. So a hand of glory was a tool of folklore. Now, there's a couple different purposes with— there are uses with it, but it starts with literally a human hand, okay? Um, often the hand that was cut off of a thief.

Yeah.

Okay, and that's important because it's, it's a, it's a, it's an example of what's known as sympathetic magic. And sympathetic magic is built on the concept of like is connected to like. There's also a branch of sympathetic magic that's like things that have touched something have passed on some of their power to things. But a good example would be most people have heard someone say, "Eat walnuts, they're good for your brain." And then they'll point to an open walnut and say, "Look, it even looks like a brain." So there's a lot of herbs. If you go look through the vitamin section at a supermarket, CVS or something, you'll see things like bloodwort and, uh, like a word with wart after it, and it's often named after a body part. And it's because somebody looked at the plant and said, wow, that looks a lot like the human body part, let's name it after that, and I bet it's useful in treating that, right? So that's, that's sympathetic magic. It's this idea that, that God wrote the, the purpose of a thing into its physical appearance.

Seems legit.

So within this realm, we have the Hand of Glory, and the Hand of Glory was a hand, a human hand that was often dried, pickled, you know, they drain it of blood, they set it out in the sun. There's a whole recipe in the book, you know, quoting from somebody from a few hundred years ago.

I love the recipes. They're wild.

You hang it on your door for a while, and you know, the end result—

And a couple of flowers. Yes.

It's on the door knocker, you know.

You can use it in the meantime.

And what you end up with is, essentially a mummified human hand that either wicks are attached to the fingers.

I love that so much.

So that you can burn the fingers as candles.

Absolutely obsessed.

Or the hand is dipped in wax and you simply light the fingers on fire themselves, like, either way.

Go for it.

Because of its association with theft, you had a couple of uses for a Hand of Glory. One is that you could, as a thief, carry one with you, and if you had it when you broke into somebody's house, no one would be able to wake up from their sleep. It was like carte blanche freedom to do whatever you wanted in their house, right? So it was like, you imagine somebody with it on a chain hanging off their hip, like, I got this. Yeah, I've got this dead hand with me.

Yeah, but then what could go wrong?

On the other side of it, also connected to theft, people who had a home and wanted to protect themselves could have a Hand of Glory in the house and that was supposed to ward off evil.

Like a talisman.

Yeah.

Which if there's a hand hanging off your door, I'm not hitting you up. I'm not going to break into that house.

Absolutely.

That would make sense.

That's fair.

I'd be like, they mean business in there. Yeah.

So they're not messing around.

I think it makes sense.

Yep.

Yep. I love it.

It's delightful to think that people had this—

Just hanging around.

Mounted human hand with some half-burned fingers on them.

I love that.

And just imagine, I'm sorry, I have to go here, the smell.

Yeah. Yeah, what did that— that was not a Yankee Candle.

No, no.

That's not what I look for in a candle, you know?

But I think everything smelled.

That's true.

So maybe I think it wouldn't even—

Oh yeah.

Like you'd be like, that's just another smell.

Yeah, maybe the wax like slightly obscured the death.

Maybe.

Right.

Yeah.

You never know.

'Cause they all smelled.

Oh yeah. That is for sure.

Yeah, it might've improved things, honestly.

It honestly might've. So at least you're getting like a burning smell.

You know, something.

To cancel out everything else.

Yeah, the poop in the streets. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, you know, and you know, every version of a Hand of Glory, I feel like they have like a slightly different recipe, if you will.

Yeah, yeah.

Is there one historical account of like a recipe or a hand of glory situation that made you be like, that's enough research for today, I think I'm gonna check out?

Through the magic of editing, I am gonna, um, I'm gonna look really quickly here.

I got this.

Cut out the next 10 minutes of me flipping through. I mean, so chapter 6 is called Overly Sympathetic, and There's a lovely drawing of a lit hand of glory. And I start off by talking about like why hands, because hands were like this really symbolic thing in a lot of belief systems.

I get that too.

Other examples.

You know, like hands, I feel like are individualistic.

I'm a Gemini, so Gemini rules the hands.

Oh, I didn't know that.

Yeah.

I always look at people's hands.

I know, you are fascinated by ants.

I'm like a ant person.

Yeah, yeah.

Maybe it's not in the italic that I want it to be in, but there is a really good recipe in here that I just, I was struck by the deliberate nature of it. I mean, it's like Betty Crocker step-by-step. Here are very specific things that you need to do.

Don't measure with your heart.

Like, you have 3/4 of a cup of blood, please.

This isn't like vanilla extract.

It's really eye-opening, so I highly recommend digging into that chapter.

Yeah, get into that chapter because—

yeah, chapter 6, everybody.

Yeah, Hands of Glory forever. And what's crazy about Hands of Glory, like we were just talking about, is that people really believed this worked.

Like, absolutely believed, like steadfast.

Why do you think that people put so much faith into that specifically?

So if all you need is a handful of moments where it seems to have worked for people to say, "See?" So, like, you know, one of the things that I have in the book is an article from an Irish newspaper from mid-1800s where they said, it's like the police blotter in your local newspaper, right? Like, "So-and-so had a break-in at her house, but they attempted to use a hand of glory, and, you know, they did X, Y, and Z, and the thieves were thwarted." And, you know, you throw a couple of reports like that in a newspaper and people start to believe that, yeah, This is gonna work.

Yeah. I mean, it's like confirmation bias.

Right, exactly. That's actually what it is, yeah.

But it's also gross enough that very few people actually went about making them.

That's true.

So there aren't a, there's like a pub in England that used to have one on display. Oh, cool. They claim to have found it in a wall, but then it was stolen. Irony of ironies, like a talisman against theft was stolen a couple decades ago and they've never gotten it back.

Bring it back.

There's also a museum that has one. Um, but there aren't a lot of them extant. So it's— yes, we also look at that and say, is it just a lot of story with very few examples? But people believe that it would work.

I mean, yeah, would you have fallen for it back then? Do you think?

Back then, probably.

I feel like it makes sense.

I was ready to just—

yes, yeah, yes, yes, yes.

It's the hand of a thief.

That's the thing, it's—

I might believe it now. Yeah, like you said, you put that on your door, I'm not coming over.

No, you— it kind of makes sense. Yeah, you know, I don't know if I believe it for the thief. I believe it to thwart against—

to thwart.

Yes, yes, that's right. I like it.

Also, the weird thing where You have to douse the flame. Like, there's a story in there about, and it's kind of legend, it's kind of fact, but of a pub that was being robbed by a traveler who came, set up the Hand of Glory, said this magical phrase, and everybody in the house who was asleep stayed asleep. But the housemaid who had been instructed to stay awake and take care of this traveler's needs was still awake, so she didn't go to sleep, and she was able to run to the kitchen and get milk and extinguish the flames, because that's what you do. You use milk to extinguish the flames.

Obviously.

Interesting.

So Hand of Glory is lactose intolerant, apparently.

There you go.

Dairy intolerant. There we go. Yeah. Hey, let's go. A lot of us are. Yeah.

I mean, you know, join the club.

It wouldn't work at my house. Now, you have researched for lore as well some really crazy cursed objects. Where do you think the Hand of Glory ranks? Among those objects.

It's definitely on the far side of like the gross scale. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, there are other, I guess, more neat and clean cursed objects, you know, like, um, the car that Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in, you know, was said to be very cursed, and James Dean's car, things like that. But as far as like gross cursed objects, yeah, yeah, it's high up there.

It's right up there, I would say. So yeah, it's a tough one to make.

Yeah.

Like you gotta get a person in that can take their hand. So that's a lot. Yeah. You gotta commit to it.

Yeah. I made a lot of hand puns in that chapter and I just wanna preemptively apologize to anybody.

They hit every time.

Don't even apologize. It's what you had to do.

Never for dad jokes and never for puns do you apologize here.

Sometimes they just present themselves and you have to—

You gotta take them.

You have to take them.

Yeah. You can't let them pass by.

You're speaking our language.

You really are.

We love a dad joke.

We do.

I feel like we've kind of foreshadowed this topic a bit. Talking blood. Oh, I love this concept. Yeah, I never heard of it before the book. So tell me, do you think that people genuinely expected the blood to reveal the killer, or do you think it was more about putting this like psychological pressure on somebody who might confess?

It's hard to say, you know, a couple centuries later, uh, because I don't want to spoil stuff, but it's there were some fairly recent examples, um, non-European examples of people thinking that the blood of like a murder victim would cry out who their killer was.

I'm obsessed with that.

I, I do, I do really wish that the social aspect was understood and known because the idea of— so just to quickly summarize this, there was this idea, um, that someone who was murdered the blood in their body would react to the touch of the killer. So people have heard the phrase trial by fire.

Mm-hmm, yep.

There's a whole different group of trials. There's trial by water, you know, the whole witch thing where they duck the witch under the water. Does she float, does she not? That's a trial. There's a whole series of trials, and they're usually founded in some aspect of Christian theology. And trial by blood is also known as cruentation. And it just has to do with this idea that you find a body, somebody got stabbed, and let's bring all the suspects in, and they'll touch the body, and something will happen if the killer touches the body. The wound that has been closed up will bleed fresh blood, or the flesh will bruise. And it won't do that for innocent people. That was the belief. God was going to speak a truth through some physical reaction. They really did believe it. Like they really did believe that there was a religious aspect to this and that it was happening. But there's really a part of me that I want there to have been like a manipulation going on as well. Like the story that I told in the book of one cruentation had the entire village processed through the hall first before the guy that everybody suspected.

He was the last. He had to stand in line. He had to doubt and sweat it out.

Sweat it out.

Yeah. And I want to believe that that was on purpose.

Yeah. It has to be, right?

To force a confession of, you know, like, "I won't do it, guys. I won't do it. I'll just confess right now." Yeah, right. You know?

Or just watch him, like, physically melt down as he's about to. It's like innocent people would be like, "All right, well, it's not going to happen. I didn't kill this person." Right. Yeah.

"I guess we'll just get this over with.

What a weird practice." But there were instances where it was used and they use the results from these cruantation tests in court, right?

It's gnarly.

By the way, you're going to the gallows now because, uh, you touched a body that had a sewn-up wound and blood came out.

And a little trickle of blood. Yeah, clearly did this.

Yeah, clearly it was you.

Yeah, right.

That's like spectral evidence. It is.

Exactly.

It's like, that's wild that that was just used legally, right? But they also used to think— I, I, like, in some places or times, they used to think that, like, the last image of someone's killer would be captured in someone's eyes. Oh yeah.

Yeah.

And I loved that.

That is— Right?

Next level. Didn't they do like all sorts of photography experiments trying to capture that?

Yeah, they would try and see. I loved that.

Oh, that would be a great episode.

I know, isn't that just interesting?

Like just in and of itself.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's super interesting.

Now I wonder, I mean, you answer this question in your book, but why do you think blood specifically became the thing that people thought would reveal this truth?

So there are, there were moments in writing the book where I thought, why am I talking about this topic? For reference, like, I sat down with my research assistant, Sam, and we, like, I said, here's where I think we need to go. Let's build an outline. You'll start researching. We'll find places where maybe we're a little off and we need to adjust, or we'll expand, that kind of thing. And every now and then I had this thought of, is this really important to Mercy Brown? But what you had to understand about Mercy Brown's story was that they were looking for signs of fresh blood in the corpse of the supposed, you know, call them vampire, call them, you know, whatever. Well, why were they looking for signs of fresh blood? Well, blood meant something to people in previous eras, and it's because they believed that the blood, the human blood was like the connective tissue that held the soul and the body together, and that gave blood a very special power. It was the glue that you had. You had a layer of the human body and you had the soul, the material and the spiritual, but there had to be something that glued them together and blood was it.

This is why epilepsy comes up a lot in the drinking of blood in the book, because for like 2,000 years, people believed that what was happening in an epileptic's body when they were having a seizure was that they were somehow, they weren't dying, They weren't dead. They were like, one scholar called it quasi-dead.

Quasi-dead.

I'm not dead yet, right?

Not quite yet.

They were like almost dead because what was happening physiologically, their soul and their body were separating and they needed an infusion of fresh blood to like reglue them back together again. So blood became this really important thing in a lot of cultures for a lot of reasons, but it was because there was some vitality in the blood.

Right.

And that's where, like, you have a dead body, but the blood is still— there was an assumption that when you died, there was a linear process. At life, you have runny blood. And as your body decomposes, that, like, congeals. It becomes thicker and thicker until it's just a dry dust in your veins.

Right.

But in reality, what happens is you decompose and it gets a little thicker. And then you decompose some more and it actually thins up more. And they, they went in with this false pretense of, well, if it's runny, it's got a lot of life left in it, and so that life could communicate things to us. God can use that and point to a killer.

It's so fascinating, isn't it?

That's so—

I understand why they believed it to some extent, you know?

Yeah, you can see where it comes from, right?

Like, it's not crazy. No, but it is crazy.

It's not that they sat down and said, what is the most batshit idea, I feel like. They worked through it with logic. They were doing the best they could with what they had at the time.

The tools they had, exactly.

They had no way of knowing that it goes from runny to congealed and thick to runny again.

And how would they?

So when they see it go runny again, they're like, well, something made that happen. Exactly. 'Cause that's not natural.

There must be life left in there.

Yeah, that's life. Like, that's wild to think about.

You also see this in a lot of early vampire folklore in like, Serbian culture, where there, there are people who are deemed just more likely to become a revenant or a vampire after death. Um, alcoholics, um, people who are irreligious. It's, it's essentially like you run through the list and you realize it's all the social outcasts. Yeah, it's all the people who did bad things.

Yeah.

Well, it turns out that people who do bad things in society 200, 300, 400 years ago they don't get buried in the same way. They don't get put in a nice shroud in a coffin and buried in the ground at a good depth. They're usually thrown in with just a piece of cloth around them. And what happens is that makes the decomposition process behave differently than it would inside of a box. And so they go and maybe they open the grave by mistake or they go to check on something and they find that the body has done something very unusual. Well, of course it has.

'Cause it used to set up for this moment to have this unusual state.

So they othered them.

Exactly.

Confirmation bias, essentially. Like, they, they built the system that created the bodies that made them believe in vampires by, by labeling— it's just—

yeah, yeah, it makes so much sense. Yeah, it was all set up. They're set up to fail.

I was just gonna say, like, they're set up to be vampires, right?

Right.

You know. Now moving just like kind of like parallel here to talk a little bit about Lore. I love Lore.

Thank you.

Lore was the first podcast I ever listened to, and I have to thank Dub Dub, our— yes, our best friends who introduced me. She wanted to be here today because she was like, I want to meet Aaron.

Thank you.

She couldn't get childcare.

Thank you, Deb Deb.

See you soon.

Oh, she'll die.

No, don't die. Don't die. Say alas. But you've been doing Lore for over a decade now. How long has it been?

It'll be 12 years in March.

That's crazy. So I have to ask, what made you start the show to begin with? I know you started with Mercy Brown. What made you want to go further?

I wanted to be a novelist. I wanted to write Stephen King-type spooky stories, right?

I feel like you could. Yeah.

He dips a lot into folklore.

Yep.

You know, like Pet Sematary. Yeah. He's dipping into Algonquin mythology and stories. And I self-published a handful of thrillers like that. And what I tried to do is I would go look for good New England things like that and weave them in.

We have so many good New England things.

Oh, yeah. And when you weave them in, it kind of grounds it. Like, people say, I've heard of that. And it makes the rest of the story more believable. But I would find more than I needed. And so I had this like overflowing folder of just information, of stories, of like real life things that had happened. And I thought, I can't use all of these. But I was also self-published and, you know, you'd write a book and sell 5 copies and it was a little disheartening. So I thought, well, if I could increase my email list, 'cause, okay, we have to remember this is like before the podcast wave. This was back when—

You were at the very beginning.

Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, Mailchimp was barely a thing. I don't remember how I was doing my email list at the time, but I thought I have like 60 people on my email list, and if I could increase that, then I've increased how many people might buy a book. So I thought, I'll give them something for free that will be of value, and they'll sign up for my email list in return, and I'll sell enough books to buy a cup of coffee.

That'll be great. Win-win.

Win-win.

That's all we want.

So I wrote one. Mercy Brown's story, and then I wrote another. I think I wrote 4 of them, and I looked at the PDF. At some point, I realized, holy crap, this is 10,000 words. And at the time, cell phones were like half the size that they are today.

Oh, yeah.

You know, they were tiny. And I thought, I'm gonna be giving people a PDF to pinch and zoom and read on this tiny little smartphone. It's just not worth it. And so I gave up.

I'll just tell it to 'em.

Yeah, I gave up. I dragged the icon for this Pages file over to my trash can, I was about to let go, and I thought, well, wait a minute, I listen to audiobooks. Maybe it would be more convenient if people listened to me tell them these stories. So my next plan was to record those stories, put them in a zip folder, and give them a link to download it. Oh my God, from Gumroad or someplace like that. And, and that was my grand plan. And the audio was so horrible. Oh, so horrible.

Been there.

Yeah, I was in a the attic of my old house was horsehair plaster, hardwood floors, IKEA furniture. Everything was reflective.

That was pretty much our first pod lab in a laundry room.

In a laundry room.

In a laundry room.

In the attic of some church.

Metal appliances, right?

Yes.

Yeah.

Things just dinging off of everywhere.

I might've been actually reading this script off of a glass-fronted monitor. Like pick all the things you could do wrong, I did them wrong. And so I had to put some music underneath it.

—That's one of the things I love about Lore. It's so cool.

—I just had to deaden the echo and take care of that tinniness. And then I sent a couple of them to a buddy of mine, and I said, what do you think? And here's my plan. Zip link. You know, they're going to download the file, and they can listen to it however they want. And he said, don't do it. Don't do it. This is a podcast.

And you're like, what's that?

No, a podcast is like a couple of guys sitting around talking about technology. Yeah. Because that's what it was for a really long time. Because to make a podcast used to be a highly technical thing. Mm-hmm. Hosting your file, broadcasting an RSS feed signal on the internet, all this stuff.

Yeah, you weren't just doing it from your—

You guys don't realize what goes into it.

Yeah, it's a little bit easier now. It is easier now. A bit, yeah. Maybe too easy.

I know, that's why there's 40 million.

Absolutely, absolutely too easy. There needs to be a tax on a microphone, I think.

I think so, yeah, yeah. But I took him at his word. I said, okay, I think he mentioned Serial at the time. He's like, "No, there's this new show called Serial. They're like playing with storytelling within podcasting. This is storytelling, you should do it." And I was like, "All right, I'll try it." So at the time I was a graphic designer. I did branding for companies. So making the podcast artwork was no problem. I went to Squarespace 'cause I had already been hearing ads for them elsewhere and set up a website and figured out how to work through iTunes at the time, not Apple Podcasts, but iTunes. And get it all broadcast. I hosted it on Libsyn. It was like $5 a month unlimited downloads. Oh my God. Yeah, it was great.

What was our first one? Was it Blueberry?

Blueberry. Blueberry, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I remember them, yeah. And then I launched it. And that day, that first day, I had 9 downloads.

Oh my God. That's a big deal, day one.

Day one, truly day one.

I might've been one or two of them. Hey, that's all right, but whatever. Whatever, yeah.

There was still a few more.

Over the last decade, I've met, I think, a couple hundred people who have said, oh, I was— I listened to you since day one. Yeah, I love the— I love the idea of it. Like, no, you couldn't have all done it.

Couldn't have all done it.

You're like, there's actually only 7 of you.

I'm one of the 9. I need to know the 7 people need to stand up right now. I need to see.

Yeah, so, um, yeah, that was— that was it. I love that. March 15th.

What a cool way to start it though.

That's a great way to start. And thanks to the friend that made you do that.

Seriously. Yeah. Yeah, truly. And now one of the things I love is the music behind it. It's Chad Lawson, right?

Chad's amazing.

Who does the score? Yeah. The scoring, it is, if you're not listening to Lore, I don't know what you're doing right now because it is the coziest. Like my kids, like there's certain episodes that I'll let them listen to if they're like not too spooky. Yeah. And they love it. It's like very soothing in the car. Like the music, your voice is very soothing.

There's an ASMR quality to it. There is.

There really is. Yeah.

And is there a topic that you've covered on Lore that you, it was like a rabbit hole that you just couldn't get out of and like constantly find yourself going back to?

Well, yeah, I mean, maybe not to my listeners' delight. If I've gotten any compliments, sorry, any criticism over the last decade, it has been, why so many witch stories? Oh, that will never be criticism here. Because there are a ton of them. And they're fascinating. They're fascinating. They are. They're often like about a single community and they have their personal community personality as being projected onto the events that happen, they're always fascinating. And so every time a new one comes up, it has a new spin. And that to me, it's worth telling the story again. Right, yeah.

Absolutely. We've told quite a few witch trials and they're all different and all horrible, but fascinating. But fascinating.

Fascinating. And I think the Salem witch trials, I'm like, I don't know how anybody gets sick of learning of that or hearing about that.

No.

I learn something new about that all the time. Yeah. I think that is one of the most fascinating things. It is. Ever. Yeah.

And one of my personality traits is I like to tell people they're wrong about something they thought they knew. Yeah. I don't— I take great delight in that.

You guys have that in common. You guys absolutely have that in common.

I'd like to say that it's because I want to be a teacher, right?

I want to teach them. That's a nice way of saying that.

Yeah. I just, I like to say— I just like to be right. Yeah. That's not right.

What's your star sign? What's that? What's your star sign? Leo. Okay.

There you go. Does that fit? I don't know anything about that.

It fits. Yeah. Yeah. I think so. And not in a bad way.

Yeah. No. So like with the Salem witch trials, you'll hear people say, oh, it was just moldy bread. Why are you spending so much time talking about it? It was moldy bread. No, look, moldy bread was a theory for like one month in, I think, 1976. Somebody put it forward in a journal and a month later it was retracted. That was it. But it's a simple answer. And simple answers have the longest legs. They go the distance.

They please the masses.

Which is why so much of what happens in Exhumed stuck around for so long because in a way they were very simple answers.

And they're easier to digest. Yeah. People can be like, oh, moldy bread. That's why that happened. Exactly. Yeah. They won't do that.

Or it was a property dispute. Yeah. No, it wasn't a property dispute.

Like, no, that wasn't it.

There's so much more that goes into that.

That's also horrifying if it was just a silly property dispute. Like, damn. Yeah. Oh yeah. That honestly, those are also probably my rabbit holes and probably yours too. Yeah. Absolutely. Whenever there's a witch trial somewhere, I can't. Yeah. I can't look away. Mm-hmm. I have to know what's going on there.

I love a witch trial and I love a scandal. Yeah. I love a good scandal. You do love a good— Yeah. Like an old money scandal. Those are the rabbit holes I fall down. Yeah.

So dig into, there's an Italian witch trial, I wanna say 1500s, in a town called Triori. Ooh. T-R-I-O-R-I. We've had that suggested.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, that one's, it's just so different. Okay. It's like a very different aspect of European culture. And I think it has a little bit of the drama of like, you know, a nasty priest who's, you know, there's abuse and a lot of, you know, patriarchy on full display.

Oh, that's up my alley.

Let's go. I love a messed up priest. So do you.

I do love a messed up priest. Yeah. That's why I love it. That's why I love Midnight Mass.

Yeah, I have yet to see that, but I will say the newest Knives Out— oh, Wake Up Dead Man. Oh, I haven't seen the newest one.

It's really good.

It is really good. Okay. Yeah.

All right. Yeah, it'll be right up your alley. All right, cool.

You need to watch Midnight Mass. Okay. Yeah, things— it's like a spooky little New England village too, like fishing, so it's got those vibes to it.

Uh, Widows Bay is next on my list to watch. I haven't seen any of it, so we've been yelling at Aiden to watch Widows Bay.

I actually watched it all in one day. Oh my gosh. Yeah, we had a day off. It was raining and I said, I know what I'm doing.

It took Jon and I like so long to watch the show.

I always wish that I— I don't suggest watching it all in one day because now I'm like, I want to do it all again.

I'd like to stretch it out. Yeah, it's so good that we are— and we never get to watch it. Like, Jon and I will take 100 years to watch a show because the kids go to sleep. We'll sit down to watch it. Inevitably one of them will come down and need something or have a stomachache or a nightmare. We'll have to do the whole thing. They ate dairy. So we get like 10 minutes of a show at a time where we can like stretch it out. And Widow's Bay was like just enough where we were able to finish it. But even now I'm like, I want to start it again and rewatch. I do too. That's how good that show is. Yeah. That's an immaculate show.

I think too, it's one of those shows where on a rewatch you might pick up things you didn't the first time. So I love that. Yeah. It's so fun.

And it's got really good New England vibes.

I was literally— you took the words out of my mouth. I was just going to say that.

Well, and I'm North Shore. Like, I've driven south to be with you. Yeah, but, um, Rockport and Gloucester, where they— that's where they filmed— like, I was just in Rockport a couple weeks ago.

Yeah, we want to go because you can just like walk around all the filming locations.

I can't wait to watch the show and picture it from that— yeah, from that angle.

Because Rockport is Widow's Bay. Like, it's just— that's amazing. That's it. You're going to see it and just be like, oh, that's that.

You'll probably be like, I've been there.

And everybody in that show feels like they're from New England.

Like, they just It's right. My girl Rosemary. Yeah, love Rosemary.

Like, I just get it. I love it.

But speaking of New England, yeah, it worked out.

It kind of worked out perfect. Why do you think that New England is like such a hub of the spookiest legends and stories?

So a lot of folklore comes from fear, right? And there's a, there's a lot of the United States that was settled in relative safety. Um, There's a lot of nuance to that, and people can pick that apart. But in New England, it was sort of like you were on the edge of the known world in the early 1600s, and there was a lot more danger. I mean, when people want to talk about what really caused the Salem witch trials, one of the big factors was that there were settlers. So what is now the state of Maine used to be part of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, extended all the way up there. And there were settlers way up in, like, Wells, who were essentially at war with the Native Americans because they had wandered into Native American territory and started to take land, and they were rightly defending themselves. So these white Christian colonists were referring to the Native Americans as the devil, and that the devil was out to get them. And the conflict was so bad that they were actually like, reverse migrating back down to Salem. And so you had in Salem, people flooding in having lost family members, they were wounded, they had been fighting with the devil.

Like, for them, fear was like this mist all around them, just trapping them in. And that's, I think, in New England, a lot more common than you might find in like, where I grew up, Illinois. You know, by the time my hometown was settled, like, the United States had forced Native Americans far, far away. And so that element of fear wasn't there. I think in New England, you just get a lot of it. You also get a mix of a lot of different— there's a mix of faiths. You've got Protestant, Catholic, the Puritan element of that. There's mixtures of cultures. There's different waves of it. And it's— Fear just becomes this really common thread through it all.

Yeah. Yeah. And it's a monster. Fear is definitely in all these stories.

Because when you're afraid and you don't have the answers, the human instinct is to invent an answer that fills in the gap, you know? And so you see that with Mercy's family, right? You see, you know, George Brown loses his wife first. About a year later, he loses his oldest daughter. And then his son, his only son gets sick, and there's some weird stuff going on here. He's the only one they send out to Colorado to get better. Yeah. Right? Like, the man can go.

Like, he gets to go get better. He gets to breathe fresh air.

And while he's gone, Mercy gets sick and dies. He comes back after her death. They're afraid, right? Like, they've lost— and it's interesting. I wanted to make sure that I— I noted this, so whenever you hear Mercy Brown's story, you hear about those four. You hear George has got a wife who dies, the oldest daughter, Edwin is sick, and then Mercy dies. That's all you ever hear. But there are so many other kids. So Mary Eliza is the mom, Mary Olive is the oldest, and then you've got Edwin, Annie, Mercy, Hattie, Jenny, and Myra. I mean, when George's wife dies, there's a 2-year-old in the house. Holy shit. That's how, like, people picture just a couple of teenagers who passed away, but it's like this bustling farmhouse, right? A couple of years after his wife dies, his father dies, not from tuberculosis, but still like that grief thread is still there. And I think George's mom is living in the house with them. And so you've just got all of this fear being mixed up. And it's really the community who's afraid at some point. Hey, there's a lot of Browns who are dying. What's up with your family?

So let's take care of this fear by doing this thing, right? Yeah. And what's ironic is that it doesn't work, right? Like Edwin, spoiler alert, dies. And then after that, 3 years later in 1895, both Jennie and 25-year-old Annie also pass away from consumption. In 1899, their youngest sister Myra dies from consumption as well. So tuberculosis is taking all of them out. The only one to live is, uh, is Hattie, who actually lives until 1954. That's— which is crazy. I put in the book here because I like, I like putting people in a, like, a frame of reference to help people understand. Yeah, she learned about her sisters and her mom being exhumed to look for signs of what was essentially a vampire and lived long enough to see the premieres of I Love Lucy, The Ed Sullivan Show, and American Bandstand.

When you can do automobiles, telephones, Wow.

Yeah, it's mind-boggling.

That is absolutely mind-boggling. So she lived through it. Yeah, I would say so. I would say so.

She's the definition of I've seen some shit.

Yeah, she said, you don't know what I've been through. She's seen it. Wow.

So yeah, and fear is at the heart of all of what was going on. It is like reacting to a fear, inventing an answer to calm fears, to make you feel better about what's going on. In some ways, that makes what I do for a living kind of boring. It's like, yeah, 12 years of making lore, but the answer at the end of the day is fear. People were afraid.

Yeah. Story, right? Yeah. But our brains do some messed up things when we're afraid.

That's the thing, the way people react to fear is so scary. I mean, the Salem Witch Trials, Puritans are wild. Wild.

They're wild. Yeah, absolutely. Haven't stopped doing it since.

Nope. Nope. We keep on doing it. We don't learn a damn thing.

History repeats itself.

It sure does. Yes. Yes. Now, what would be the creepiest legend that you feel isn't talked about enough? Was there one that you saw that you were like, why is this not Bigfoot?

That's the one. Yes. Creepiest legend. I mean, some of the creepiest get talked about because they're super creepy. Mothman, for example. Oh yeah, I love Mothman. Yeah. The, like the seeing Mothman as like a portent of doom and then looking at the events that happened There's some really creepy things going on there.

Oh yeah, um, I love an omen, like a harbinger.

Yeah, you know, so creepy. Yeah, creepy in a different sense, you know. Have you, have you ever done the story of Mary Toft, the woman who gave birth to rabbits?

Oh my God, I was just reading about that the other day. That's so strange you brought that up.

It's creepy in a different sense.

Yeah, it sure is. It's, it's spooky.

It's got something.

What she did with those rabbit parts.

Girl, that is— that's another one we need to cover. I just put that on my list recently. Yeah. Although I have to say, I'm surprised that Gwyneth Paltrow hasn't, you know, tried some of those, figured that out, hasn't added it into the goop lineup with the G company.

She has time. Yeah, you know, TM.

Now I wonder, because this happens to us a lot, have you ever started researching one topic and then you fall into a completely different topic that that you stumble upon along the way.

Yeah, and so a decade ago, I thought that was distraction, right? Like the inability to focus on something. But the more episodes you make, you know this, that you need more episodes if you're gonna keep going. And you start to realize that those moments are the moments where you need to make a note, put a pin in it, set it aside, follow that rabbit trail later, and that becomes another episode. Because the best stories are found in the midst of researching a story, right? Like, it's the side thing, the related thing, which is, I mean, it's why this book is what it is, because you research one thing and you realize that there's 5 other things connected to it. And those are the side things.

And they all are links to each other.

And they become something later on. So for lore, we do, I don't know how you guys plan out stuff, but like we do an annual writer's room. Whoa. And so. That's so cool.

We do not do that.

We do lore every other week, and then in between we do lore legend. And those tend to be a little bit more toward, like, the urban legend, maybe a little less factually grounded. The idea that there's still valuable stories to tell, right? Music's slightly different. Format's the same. And so we'll do an annual writers' room for lore, and then 6 months later, one for legends. And it is the whole team of researchers and writers together pitching for, like, a day or 2 straight over, video chat, pitching a story idea. Like, here's my micro outline for it. I think that we should do Act 1 on this, Act 2 on this, Act 3. The epilogue at the end of the episode can be about a related story about this. Oh, that's cool. And then we brainstorm and throw sources at each other. And we'll try to, over the course of maybe a day, day and a half, lock down 25, 30 stories. Oh, wow. That is so fun. So I'm planned out to the beginning of '28 right now.

Oh, that's— Wow. I planned out to like a couple weeks from now.

I was going to say, damn, living on the edge.

And honestly, that's us being like, look at us.

Yeah, that's us being like, whoa, look at us go. That's a cool concept. We're going to give that a try.

I know. I feel like that's such a better way to do it because sometimes we're like mood podcasters. We are mood podcasters. We're like, we'll be like, I don't feel like telling this story today, so I'm going to switch at the last second.

Or sometimes I'll have a completed story and then I'm like, I don't want to tell it today. I'm going to move on to this one.

Yeah, we'll switch, which is not the way to do it. No, if I'm being quite honest.

I mean, there's something to be said about it sometimes. Yeah, it works out sometimes.

You have to talk about it. So if you're going to talk about it, you might as well— right, exactly.

You have to be in the mood to talk about it.

And the good news is it's done when you are in the mood. That's the thing.

Exactly. It's waiting for you. That's the thing. That's what I always tell myself to make myself feel better about it.

We're always like, it's done, so you can use it.

Right, exactly. There we go.

Yeah, but yeah, we're constantly on the edge. We do that a lot.

Now I wonder, because again, this has happened to us Is there ever a piece of folklore that you stumble across that you either desperately want to debunk but can't, or that you almost don't want to debunk that you do?

Oh, wanting to preserve the— that, that raw innocence of people believing something. Right. Again, back to my personality trait of liking to burst people's bubbles. I don't know that I've ever wanted to preserve the belief in something.

I was gonna say, I don't know how it feels. See, I'm the total opposite.

I'm like, no, I don't wanna ruin this for you. It's so fun.

I'm like, but I'll handle it as a storyteller. Yeah, of course. I will tell people in an episode, but that's not true. Yeah. But I'll do it after I've told them the story.

And they've had the fun.

From a point of belief. Yeah. Right? Like, here is the story that people tell and cling to. And I, like, I really want them to experience the story.

Almost like you set up Exhumed with the Rosie Brown story.

I'm just sorry to say that like— It didn't go that way. It didn't actually, and here's the 3 reasons why.

Right, you're like, am I really sorry to say? I don't know.

Because I like fact, I like research, and if the research says that can't have happened. You know, there was a story we did of a haunting in DC, like one of the mansions in DC had this, you can do a ghost tour of it now, The basic gist of it is that this family had two daughters when they were in their teens or so. Each one, like, years apart, fell down the stairs and died.

Okay.

Damn. And yeah, they lost both their kids falling down the stairs. And so, of course, they tell you this story on the stairs during the ghost tour, right? Of course. Well, fun. Those daughters are in a graveyard, and their gravestones have dates on them. Uh-oh. And the dates do not match up with the stories. Oh, no. And it turns out that we know how they both died. One of them was from an illness like tuberculosis.

Yup.

You know, it's quaint to want to hold on to that. I can see the drama and like the appeal of a story like that. Go ahead and tell the story all you want, but at the end of the day, the evidence is there that says it didn't happen. And I feel like I wouldn't have integrity if I didn't at the very least say, by the way— We do have the scripts.

They're lying to you. I have to tell you the truth.

We do have records.

Have you ever come across the story of the casket girl? In New Orleans. Yeah. That one is so interesting. But then you get through it and you're like, yeah, that probably didn't happen. Exactly.

You're like, I think I know what that was. So many people love the idea of that story.

It's so fun. The idea of it is awesome.

Because how fun is that? Like, and especially with New Orleans.

But then the truth of it is pretty awful. Yeah, the truth is way worse. Yeah. Yeah. So that's why it's almost fun to lean on the fun of it all.

That they were vampires or just smuggling vampires.

Yeah. You know what? I want to give those women that power back. Yeah. Yeah. You were vampires destroying the village. Hell yeah. Now, what episode of Lore would you say are you most proud of, if you could pick one or even two?

So proud from a couple different aspects. So I'll say from a research standpoint, um, Emily Segui and the doppelgänger folklore. Okay. Because when I sat down, when I made that episode, it was still in the realm of, uh, of me doing everything. I found the topic, I researched it, I wrote it, I published it. That's why it was every other week initially. Yeah.

It's a lot of work. It's a ton of work to do, yeah.

And I wanted to do the research right. So I would, as anybody does, start online and look for resources for Emily Sagi. Whether it was a book or an online article, it was always the same story. It was the same details rearranged by some new writer, but they only had a certain number of Lego pieces to work with. So the story always had the same pieces. And that frustrated me. Because it made me feel like there wasn't a core original, more nuanced version of the story. And I really, I don't know how, but I pushed until I found a German book that was available on like books.google.com.

It's always on like the 11th page of Google.

I was gonna say, yeah.

And I remember having my laptop open to this German book and then holding my phone with like Google Translate app.

Stop it.

Pointed at the screen and reading the German words being translated into English on my phone and realizing I had found source material behind the story that had more names, more dates, more places.

Nothing is better than that.

It just feels like—

Mad respect. Yeah. That is like— That is—

that's top notch. I'm proud of that one. You should be. Did I invent a new medication for some horrible disease? No. But I found some sources. When what felt like no other writer about that story felt like it was worth time spending to find. And had gone that far. Yeah. And I was proud of that. From a storytelling aspect, I love episode 12, "Half Hanged." Oh, I love that one. Mary Webster. I love that one. 17th century woman in colonial Massachusetts accused of witchcraft. And the victory and the middle finger to the establishment that that story is. Oh, such a good story.

Yeah, Half-Hanged Mary. Yeah, we have talked about that. I love that story. And that—

so, and she was a real woman. Margaret Atwood is descended from her. That's so great. And Margaret Atwood wrote a poem, and it's like in 12 stanzas about the last 12 hours of her life. And at the end of the poem, you know, this is a woman that was accused of being a witch, and she's like, I'm not a— like, they shipped her off to Boston, and then yeah, for court and she came back acquitted. She, you know, nobody's like, "You guys gotta be kidding me." It was just 'cause she was cranky, she wasn't religious, she wanted people to get off her property. Good for her. You know, she was standing up for something.

Sounds like me.

She was a powerful woman.

She was poor and the powerful people in town wanted to just blame everything on her and they blamed her for the illness of their town leader, you know, their cult leader. And they hang her and he still dies from his illness. But in the morning she gets up off the ground and walks away. And so in Atwood's poem, she ends with this line that's something like, "I wasn't a witch before, but now I am one." Hell yeah.

I love that. And you get chills when you hear it. Yeah, it's so good. I love it.

That's so good. Would that be the first episode that if somebody was just starting lore today, would you tell them to start with?

Dig it. Also from a formulaic standpoint, you'll get a good sense of how lore is structured. I'm going to give you a lot of New England kind of like witch legends. There's even some wizard legends in there, which you don't bump into a lot. No. And then you dig right into the context of Mary's story and what happens. And yeah, I like it. It's a good place to start.

All right. Yeah, I think so too. You heard it here first.

You did.

Now, a lot of your stories revolve around people having a lot of faith in things. Like we talked about the Hand of Glory. And we can look back on that and we can laugh at it. Sure. What do you think is gonna be our hand of glory in 200 years that people are gonna look back and be like, "Are you guys serious?

You thought that would work?" We talked about chemotherapy already, right? And surely there has to be a better way. I imagine a century from now, I hope it's less than that. It'd be great if it's a decade from now. Oh, that'd be great. But we would have to fund the sciences, wouldn't we? We sure would.

We would, yeah. That's a step.

We're not really down to fund anything right now. Yeah. Funding something. We could fund crypto, I guess. That would cure cancer. Funding something. It's not science. But I think that that's one of the big ones, just the extremes that we're going to for something. I think about some of the early material in Exhumed talking about blood transfusion, and they were on the right path. Of course, sheep's blood might not have been the right path, but you know.

You have to start somewhere. I get why they thought blood, blood.

Experiment. It's all right.

But we don't think at all about blood transfusion today. No, it's just a normal part of medicine. Yeah. And I— it does make you wonder, what are the things that we'll look back on and see as either they were right on, they had it, they just didn't fully understand it, or boy, were they way off, off base. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's what I'm excited to see is the thing that's like blood transfusion, where we're like, oh, you were so close, right? You were the—

what are we so close to right now?

Yeah. I'm also still freaked out by like, I love blood transfusions, like A+, yay for blood transfusions. But you've had two. I have O negative blood, so I can only take O negative blood, right? And I can give to anyone. But I had to have a blood transfusion after I had my twins, and I like panicked, and I was like, I can only have O negative blood. And they were like, I know, like we went to medical school, we know that. And I was like, are you sure? You're gonna poison me? Like, I freaked out.

Well, most likely when you do get a blood transfusion, aren't they going to likely give you O negative since it's, you know, that's what they usually are going to give you.

But I just was so freaked out about being poisoned by someone else's blood. I was like, I just had my first children, don't kill me, don't kill me.

I was like, oh my God, it's valid.

It's weird. Anybody who's had a blood transfusion, it's weird because all of a sudden you're like, I need one, I'm just getting someone else's blood. Like, what?

Or people who have an organ from someone else, right?

It must be so strange. Yeah, cuz— but like, thank goodness we can do that.

Imagine if we couldn't. A dive down.

Yeah, it is. There's— I Did I touch on that in the book? I feel like I talked a little bit about like— You did talk about, yeah. There's this ideal image of a complete body. And even when we, you know, you're a healthy person who's gotten a kidney from somebody else, you frequently talk about, a decade later, you'll still talk about it as someone else's kidney. Like you are an incomplete, your life has been saved. It's a miracle of medicine, but there's still something about it that like doesn't jive with our, ideal of the perfect human, intact human body. It's not mine.

So it's not mine. Yeah, yeah, it is strange how we think that. Yeah, it is. Now, after all these years, what do you think folklore says about people?

About humans? We're very creative. We're very hopeful. You know, we can focus on fear. That's fine. But I think the answers that people have invented over the centuries or millennia, there is a hope kind of lingering in the corner that, "Hey guys, we figured it out," you know, or, "We can conquer this." challenge or problem or get around this unknown. There is a hope there that I think is really admirable. Yeah. Going through the book and writing the story in that order really made me appreciate how, how very much not barbaric these people were. By comparison, yeah, there's some weird stuff. Yeah. But they were just trying. They were human. They wanted to be hopeful and find a solution. And, you know, I think that's something to take away and say, I hope we always are a very hopeful species.

Yeah. If we lose that, what do we become? Yeah. What do we have? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I like that. And there's also, at the same time, we as people are just lovers of story. You know, whether you want to write them or you just enjoy them, very few people would say, I don't want to deal with stories at all. Those are weird people.

I was just going to say, I don't want those people around me.

There's something socially, pathic about that. Yeah, I know. I don't wanna watch TV or movies or read a book.

Yeah, I don't wanna hear a text.

What do you do then?

We, for the most part, love story. Yeah. And I love that something like podcasting where, yes, we're sitting around microphones talking and sometimes there's cameras involved, but we could have a campfire in between us. Yeah. You know, in the woods. And we'd be doing the same thing that our ancestors did. Yes. You know, 20,000 years ago or 100,000 years ago, telling stories, right?

Yeah. So. I love that.

Yeah. I think that's perfect.

I think that's a perfect answer. I love it. Well done. Awesome. All right, well. Pat myself on the shoulder.

We're not done with you yet because we always end on a game. Oh, okay. So are you down for would you rather? Yes. Okay, that's good. That works out.

Unless the question is, would you rather play a game or?

Imagine if you just said no. Right. Are you actually not? I need you. You're like, no.

For those who can't see, she's just handed me a hacksaw. And I'm very worried.

What's gonna happen here? Keep your left foot.

Foot or keep your right foot?

What do you think? Surprise, we've decided to become Jigsaw. Yeah. All right, so inspired by episode 2 of Lore, The Bloody Pit on the Husak Tunnel— a really good episode, great episode— would you rather hear phantom voices calling your name whilst inside the tunnel? Okay. Or see somebody standing at the entrance but they disappear every time you blink?

Um, I think the more preferable would just be to see something. Hearing things. I'm sorry.

It's a lot. Yeah. It's overstimulating. Yeah. That's really overstimulating.

No amount of adult diapers could help me in that situation.

No, truly. Yeah. What do you think? I'd probably feel the same way just because sound overstimulates me. So as soon as voices started, I'd just be like, ugh, like that would be it. I'd be useless.

I picture this as like a lot of voices, like disembodied. Yeah.

Just imagine that in what is essentially a man-made cave. That's the thing. The echoing. The echoing. The resonance.

Yeah.

And here's the thing that would freak me out. Yeah. But what if there's a real person that I'm seeing and I have to deal with them? I get that. That's true. I'd much rather deal with the disembodied voices.

Right, 'cause you could reason that away. Right. It's an echo of my footsteps or whatever it is. But when you see something. That's harder. That's a lot harder. Yeah.

Yeah.

So I'm going with mace. So then you're okay.

I usually do.

Yeah. Yeah. So you might be all right.

Does mace work on a ghost? Have you guys confirmed this?

I have never maced a ghost. Okay. So I do not know that, but.

But what if it's not a ghost?

Yeah, what if it's an—

what if the person that you see at the end of the tunnel is real?

That's funny. Years ago, you and I talked about doing an episode of Morbid and, and like coming on and talking about just an old creepy true crime case. And we talked about the Hammersmith Ghost. Yes, Hammersmith or Hammersfield?

Hammersmith. Yeah. And it—

and I think I've done this as a live show story before, where this was in London and the people kept seeing this white apparition walking around and And like in, I don't know, true go-get-'em fashion, people formed mobs to go out and hunt down this ghost. Of course, of course. And eventually somebody found him and shot the ghost and the ghost died and the ghost bled because the ghost was a guy who worked. Oh, he was just a guy. He was a mason who worked with stone dust all day in white clothes.

Oh, he was just covered in the dust.

He looked like a Scooby-Doo cartoon, right?

Oh, the poor guy.

And he got killed because people thought he was a ghost. That's horrific. Damn.

That's actually on my list too. You're naming all my things. I'm sorry. No, it's great. Foreshadowing. Yeah, stay tuned. Yes, exactly. It's true.

All right, my next one is inspired by episode 3, The Beast Within. Oh yes. Now, uh, would you rather travel through a medieval German forest at night or spend one night inside Bedburg while everyone believed there was a werewolf afoot? So you're either with people or you're alone in the woods.

See, what you're asking me is, would you rather endure the company of of fearful, suspicious people. Yes. Or the dark woods and whatever they contain. Yes. Yeah. Um, I think I'd rather be in the dark woods. That's a— that's a would you choose the bear question. Yep.

Absolutely. Yes. Or a German forest at night. Yeah, I'll take the German forest. German forest at night alone.

That's unanimous. Yes. Yeah, like, no, just like I choose the bear. Yeah.

Yeah. Bedburg was, was mind-boggling because not only was it a whole community of people who thought it was all real, but the guy that they accused thought it was real too. Yeah, he's like, guys, I put a belt on and I rubbed my body with some salve that I made. It's like, I think you're right, it made me turn into a wolf. I think I did. Yeah, yeah.

Like, I mean, who doesn't want that?

You couldn't win.

No, you really couldn't back them.

Yeah, because even the guy that they're accusing is crazy.

Like, shit, I can't believe I did this. We're all in on the joke here.

Yeah, right? Sure.

All right, next one is inspired by episode 113, Word of Mouth, exploring corpse medicine. And we're giving you 3 options here to be nice. Okay. Would you rather be prescribed powdered mummy, moss from a hanged man's skull, or a human fat ointment?

Okay, we can toss the human fat ointment out the door. Yes, because that, that's literally just like reduced human fat. Yeah, like to the point where— yeah, oh, and just greasy, like a lotion you can rub on your hands.

Yeah, and really, what's that gonna do for you? It's greasy.

Um, I, I'm afraid of mushrooms, and I know that that's not moss, but I was similar.

You know mushrooms were in there.

Yeah, so it's, it's like, would I want to eat some strange moss? I don't know that I want to do that. So I'm gonna go with mummy powder, and I'm gonna say that because sometimes it was ground up mummy and sometimes it was ground up bitumen, the, the black substance that was used, right? That's a, that's a fascinating bit of folklore.

Yeah, it is.

I don't know if it's hard to capture it in a story, but in the book I cover this idea that like the asphalt on our roads, it's, it's a petroleum product, right? And it's come up out of the ground all over the world for forever, and they used to call it bitumen. And for early days of Egyptian mummification, they actually covered the bodies in it to seal and preserve them. Uh, but it happens to look a lot as a sticky black liquid like what would happen if you just mummified somebody without it and let them sit in the grave for a long time. The body fluids come out and they kind of congeal into a black sticky substance. Like tar. Like tar. And so people started to confuse that stuff with actual bitumen, which like early Arabic writers prescribed as medicine for all sorts of things. Right. And so eventually that bitumen started to be confused with this exudate that came out of the bodies. And so people were taking that instead. And then they were like, well, if we're taking this, the body itself that it's on must be useful. Probably useful as well.

Yeah. Um, and so there's a Persian word for bitumen that is mummia, and that started to cause the powder to be called mummy, and then the bodies were called mummies, and now we call all preserved corpses mummies.

It's just a mistranslation. Yes, exactly.

Yep. But every time you drive on the road, you're basically driving on, on mummy, something connected to that folklore, which I think is great.

It's all metaphors, you know. Yeah, I like that.

All that to say, if I had to pick between the three of them, I would pick the mummy powder because there is the chance it's just a natural substance.

You know, I think I'm gonna go with your answer for that very reason.

Yeah, now that I know that, I'm like, all right, that's a risk. Yeah, it's a risk. But the other ones, you know what you're getting. That's the thing. Yeah, you know you're getting straight up moss from a skull.

Yeah, or, or human fat ointment.

Anything greasy, I'm out. Like greasy on my skin.

I know. I guess the only plus for the human fat ointment is that you're not ingesting it's going on your skin.

See, I have a thing with my hands greasing anything on them or like greasiness on me. I have like a texture issue.

But even the powdered mummy, sometimes they just like packed wounds with it. So yeah, you could also do that. That's true. Then you're not ingesting it.

That's true.

Yeah, I'm sticking powdered mummy.

Yeah, yeah, I think I'm gonna go with that too. All right, look at us, unanimous again.

All right, now the next one, okay, is inspired by chapter 1 of Exhumed.

All right, It is called Blood and Glory. Would you rather witness George Washington's bloodletting to his death or witness the meeting where people seriously propose trying to reanimate his corpse? Both are pretty interesting.

Yeah, they are. I mean, they essentially drained half of his body's blood over the course of a day. That's unbelievable. And he was up walking around dictating his last will and testament to wife. That's not— I would be unconscious. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I don't know how much I lost when I had the twins, but I was— you were so scared.

You were so scared.

I don't get enough coffee, I'm out of it.

Literally, right? If I don't get 8 hours of sleep, I'm not functioning.

I didn't drink enough water the other day and I thought I was dying. My Oura Ring was like, you, you're dead, like something's happening.

Exactly. So he didn't have enough blood. Yeah. And yet he was rocking and rolling. Yeah. So there's a part of me like with some morbid curiosity, lowercase m, not T-M. Don't hit me with the lawsuit for using that word. I would just, yeah, I'd kind of wanna see that whole thing play out. That whole process. Yeah. I also ask this question in the book, and you have to wonder, what did they do with all the blood?

I wonder that. They probably just tossed it out the window. I mean, that's what logic says.

Yeah, yeah. This was the era of Gardyloo, like you fill a chamber pot, you toss it outside.

That's what I was gonna say, toss it out. That's my thought process.

Did you just throw out 80, ounces of blood.

Of George Washington's blood. Of George Washington's blood.

They might have, 'cause I think they were past the point of drinking it or doing anything with it.

There's a historical thriller in there for you. Somewhere in American Museum, there's like a vial, like a box of vials of his blood.

And someone finds it. Yeah.

Some like random inventory clerk finds it.

Oh my gosh. Dan Brown, if you're listening. Yeah, call me.

So while it would be, fun to listen to the doctors arguing, especially when the whack job shows up at the end and he's like, no, let's put some sheep's blood in him, let's do it, we can still bring him back to life. Yeah, that would be fun. I want to see what— what I want to see— the blood works. That's what I want to see.

Yeah. What about you? Are you going with bloodletting?

This is a tough one because I hate to say this, but I think when they were trying to reanimate him, it might have been— to hear those conversations and to hear the thought processes. Yeah. Might be pretty fascinating. And I don't really love blood. I'm a little squeamish around blood. So that would get you around that.

Yeah, that would be some of that.

Yeah. That's a tough one. I think I'm going to go witness the meeting where we're coming up with ideas. Yeah.

I can see it. Yeah.

I'm going with the bloodletting. Yeah.

I mean, you were an autopsy technician.

I feel like I should be there. Yeah. It just makes sense. I think so.

Yeah. All right, next one. Inspired, Aaron, by your overall vibe. Would you rather have front row seats to one of history's most famous autopsies or one of history's most famous séances?

Oh, this one's hard.

This is so easy for me. I mean, I know what I would pick, but yeah, everybody listening knows what you and I would pick too.

I, I think a séance in the heyday of the spiritualist movement.

Yes, like table tipping.

Yes, with like one of the key celebrity mediums at the time, Henry Duncan Howe.

Maybe some ectoplasm coming out somewhere.

I was just gonna say that. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. There's, that's another topic that I dipped into a lot over the years with Lore. Yep. Various celebrity mediums and the rackets they ran. Oh, that's fascinating. Yeah, that'd be fascinating to do.

Terrible people.

It really would.

Terrible people.

Yes. But yeah, I agree. Séance for sure. Terrible people.

I mean, they were charlatans, but so creative. Oh, absolutely. Very creative. The things they did, the tools they created.

Yeah, it was actually brilliant. Some of the things they did. They were smart. It was like, you should have used that for better, for like better society. Seriously.

I mean, I guess in a way they're trying to make people feel better. Yeah. You know? You know? We could spend all day talking about that. Yeah, you absolutely could.

You know, my initial inclination is autopsy. Yeah.

Because that's what I thought you would.

But I'm like, I've seen a lot of autopsies. Yeah. So now I'm sitting here after you guys just thought— I was like, you haven't seen that? I haven't. I haven't been around a historical séance. Right. So are we all joining each other? I think I'm gonna join you guys. All right.

Yeah, this is great. If we're requesting attendees, like, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would have to be at the table, right? Absolutely. Yes. He was all in on spiritualism. Oh, hell yeah. Attended them constantly.

He'd be like, let's go, girls. Yeah, let's do it.

I feel like I would have done that back then too. How do you stop going to one once you see one, right? I know, you Right.

Once you start, like, I gotta see this next one.

What's this all about?

Yep, chasing the next high.

Yeah, yeah, more ectoplasm, please. Yes, please. Now my next one is inspired by chapter 18 of Exhumed, Pieces and Players. Okay, would you rather explain germ theory to an 18th century physician or explain vampire folklore to a modern infectious disease expert? I feel like I know what this will be.

I think I'd rather explain the vampire folklore. That's what I thought you would, because that's kind of what you're doing anyway. I feel like the audience would be receptive. Yeah. I don't think going back in time and explaining germ theory would have— I, I could have been burned as a witch.

I was going to say they may have just hanged you.

Yeah, I know. That's— see, I love nothing more than to make someone understand Yeah, something you guys touched on that, like, so I feel like my inclination is like, I want to make you believe germ theory. Like, I could make you believe it.

You think you could?

Like, I feel like I'm really persistent. That's true. I know that. I will not stop.

I mean, the frustrating part is that there will be listeners who simply— not listeners of the show, but like, if you go back in time and you talk to people, there will be people who listen to you and say, sorry, I don't, I don't believe it. No, like, all the facts can be presented. Yes. And yet they believe of this very, very— It's like bizarro world. Yeah. That doesn't happen anymore, but back then, that's a problem.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. That never happens now.

The cemetery scene where Mercy's body is— When they exhume her mom and then her sister, and then she's brought out of this above-ground, essentially a walk-in freezer where she's been for a couple of months. That scene is a great example of that because, you know, you've got the doctor who is always portrayed as like this old dude. Always. He's a young doctor who worked in New York City, and he was from the Providence area, so he came back. So he's like this young, up on modern science physician working in a small village, and they have begged him to do this. They've begged him to exhume the bodies and look for signs, and he's like, "Guys, you're not gonna find what you're looking for." Scientifically, this— what you believe does not exist. And they're like, we don't care. And they're like, we don't care. So finally they convince George Brown, and he's like, fine, if you guys want to do it, you guys can do it. He's not going to be there. All the stories say that George is in the graveyard. He was not there that day. Okay. Um, the doctor is finally convinced by giving money.

Like, they're like, we'll pay you to do it. And he's like, okay, fine, whatever, I'll indulge you. He cuts open Mercy's body and he says, look, signs of tuberculosis. All of the pieces are here. This is exactly what you'd expect for a body that was kept in a cooler for 2 months and not buried in the ground. And everybody looked at it and said, signs of a vampire, or whatever they were calling it at the time. Yeah, they all died of TB. Supernatural. This is all supernatural. And then they all coughed up blood into their handkerchiefs.

That's right.

Yeah, they had the evidence like literally right in front of them, staring them in the face, cut open and presented to them, and they could not believe of it.

But like you said, the same thing happens today. It's true. And it's because fear— it all goes back to fear.

Yeah, it does.

Fear and simple answers. Yes. Yeah, those are easier paths to follow.

And that would make me crazy because when someone simply will not take— yeah, like, that's how you've seen me in that situation. Yeah, where somebody just refuses to take facts. It will drive me to the—

I've done it for fun sometimes just to mess with her.

It's never fun. No, it's never fun.

Imagine you are a visitor from the future in 1892, and you're trying to explain this to people and they will not believe you.

That would make me crazy. That would cause madness.

Yeah. And you're a woman, so they'd just kill you.

They would just burn me at the stake.

Yeah.

It would really not work out. I was going to say it would work out better if you were a man, and then you told us that story.

Yeah. So that wouldn't work either. I think you need to— shit. You got to shift.

Oh, damn. I think so.

I really want to convince them.

But we could have been unanimous. I mean, you can stick with it. All right. Okay. I'll give it a try. Inspired again by your overall vibe, would you rather time travel to witness one famous historical mystery or solve one famous historical mystery today from your desk?

Um, well, solving it today would be a lot of work, and I'm busy. You are busy.

You have a lot going on.

I got you, I've got a book tour coming up. I'm not really sure I've got that on my schedule. Yeah, I— but then going back in time and witnessing a mystery kind of suggests that you're like, you're watching a murder happen, right? And not doing anything to stop it. Yes, that's true. There's some moral ambiguity there.

There is. Yeah, yeah. Because it feels like a Jack the Ripper thing, like you go back to— that's exactly right.

Seeing who he is. Could you not stop that?

Yeah, yeah, I would have. But could you?

So let me, let me compromise. Okay. And say I would have liked to have gone back to the, the beginning of the Jack the Ripper investigations and help them make smarter choices.

Yes. I think you feel exactly the same.

Steer them in a different direction.

Yeah. We don't know so much of that story because of incompetence. Yes. Yeah. And I feel like if somebody just went back in time and slapped them around a little bit. Yeah. Throttle Lantern.

What are you doing? Yeah. They need like a parent back there. They do. Like, all right, sit down. We got to get this under control. You're all being crazy.

Maybe you could appeal to them with dad jokes. Yeah, I could, you know.

Yep, get your way in there. Use a metaphor too.

I'm good at that. There you go.

Yeah, I think that would work.

Yeah, yeah. I think I would want to go back in time. Yeah. And do something about it though. We'll add that piece onto it, you know.

Yeah, that's true, because I feel like solving one today would be really cool, but then like what happens after?

I'm actually surprised you two didn't pick that, because then you have to convince people why you're correct.

But, and that's the thing, I feel like you really have to be solid because like how many people have thought they solved Jack the Ripper? A million. Don't get me started on that. And they never have and they never probably will. But, and you'd have to convince them of it. And it's the same thing as the germ theory. Yeah. I feel like people are just set in their way. They are. So I don't know.

Yeah. So we can go back and try to change it.

I'm going back and I'm watching and trying to, if I can participate. Take. Yeah, in trying to change it. Tripping somebody, just stick your foot out and trip somebody, right? Yeah, there you go. But then it's like the butterfly effect there, right? You just like ruined the rest of history, the entire timeline.

What happened?

Like the tapestry of the rest of the world. Yeah, I know. But I don't know, now in 2026, I'm like, maybe it'd be better if it changed. Maybe I will trip someone back then, see what happens. See how it shakes out, you I don't know, let's just try. Now the next one is inspired by Exhumed again. Would you rather have to diagnose an illness before germ theory or a murder before fingerprinting? Oh, not diagnose a murder but solve one.

I, I think I would rather diagnose the illness. So Galen is sort of thought of as like the father of of modern medicine. Of course, he was, what, 2,000 years ago? Um, and he was very evidence-focused, if I remember correctly. Oh, Hippocrates was, and then Galen was like, oh, let's talk about humors and let's do this stuff. And, and there was, in a lot of illness diagnosis, sort of a, a flowchart approach. You look for these pieces of evidence and then you find them on your chart start, whether it's literal or in your brain, and then you follow the options over, and then they eventually lead you to, well, this is what you do. That's what it is. And then all the answers were bloodletting.

Okay, great. Wow. So that's awesome.

There you go.

Let's just take the blood, right? Well, people talk about the four humors, and it's like black bile, yellow bile, um, blood, and then there's— I forget the other one. But, but there you can also refer to them as— there's another term for them was all blood-based. Yeah, it was like black blood, yellow blood, yellow blood. Like, it was all blood. Eventually all came down to blood. Yeah. Which is why they just bloodlet everything. Yeah, yeah. The word plethora that we use for like the— today we have told a plethora of stories, right? Plethora literally meant you had too much blood.

No way. I never knew that.

Yeah, like, you got to get rid of them. We gotta let some of that—

let's let some of that out. So, oh man, sure.

Damn.

So I guess in some way I would like to go back in time and diagnose an illness because I could just close my eyes and say, all right, give me 2 ounces of blood and then we're done.

That kind. Yeah. Yeah. There you go with it. Yep. I feel like, yeah, because that would be really easy. Just go in and then everybody claps for you and you just get to—

What an amazing position.

Well, that's true. That's true. I feel like I would want to solve a murder. I agree. Before fingerprinting. I agree.

Because when we tell those stories, they're so fascinating, like the—

how they actually got right anything solved, right?

Then would you use Cruentation? Cruentation? What is Cruentation?

Oh, that's the blood. Yeah, talking. Yeah, yeah, I would. Oh, just bring them in, bring them in, have them touch the body, see what happens. I would want to use—

I would want to use it as like a social tool. Yes, to force a confession.

I want the psychological aspect. Back to be present.

Yeah, I don't want to stand in court and be like, look, the body bled, so he's the killer. Yeah, I don't want to do that. Yeah, I have more integrity. What's going on right now? I want to manipulate the criminal.

I want someone— in fact, I'm gonna— you're gonna walk up and I'm gonna hold my hand over your pulse.

Yes.

And I'm gonna feel it, what's going on there. Yeah, I want everybody observing the sweat that's dripping down the brow. I want all of that.

That's right. Yeah, yeah, I like it.

Yeah, I'm solving a murder, period. Let's go.

All right, our next would you rather is inspired by Elena's deep obsession. Would you rather know exactly what Jack the looked like or know exactly what happened at Roanoke County?

Oh, Roanoke, hands down. That's exactly what you would say. Yeah. Yep. I mean, what the guy looked like doesn't do much. It doesn't do much. At that point, we're drifting into like the realms of phrenology. Like, yeah, that's true. If your, if your head was shaped like this, you had a propensity toward this. That was the— I don't want to dip into that. I, I would— I want to know. I think we know what happened at Roanoke. Um, they went and integrated into the Native American population.

And they tried to leave a note.

And they tried to leave a note.

Got lost in translation. That named the tribe they merged into. Yeah. But I want to see the cause, the process. I would love to watch that unfold.

Yeah, all play out. Watch the person inscribe it on the tree. Yes.

And I would also like to be there, 50 years later when Elizabeth Dare is, you know, this, you know, older blonde-haired white woman living in a community of Native Americans speaking their language. Yeah. You know, she's probably got tattoos. Oh yeah. Like, I wanna witness the last remnants of the English settlers as they're being absorbed into a more diverse culture. Yeah. That would've been really cool to see.

Documentary. Yeah, yeah, because there are legends of like blonde—

I'm sorry, of blue-eyed, uh, indigenous people in that Virginia area.

Oh shit, so that does make sense.

Yeah, yeah, that is interesting.

I like that. That's a rabbit hole I'd like to get on.

Yeah, yeah. Oh man, yeah. Oh yeah, yeah. And I think I agree that because it's like, it's not saying know who Jack the Ripper is, just what he looks like.

What are you gonna do with And at that point too, back then, you're like, I don't know, probably had a mustache. Some guy probably had a mustache, you know, he probably looked like H.H.

Holmes, you know.

Yeah, literally, because who he was not.

Yeah, no, totally. Don't get us started.

Yeah, don't worry, I agree. And honestly, it's so dark back then, you're really only going to see like the outline of someone, so you're like, I don't know, it's a person, I guess. Maybe they had a hat on.

To know it's Jack the Ripper, are you also witnessing a brutal murder? Yeah, and like, what am I gonna do?

Were you just watching him eat fish and chips?

Yeah, you know, which I don't really want to watch anyone eat, so yeah.

Murder a fillet of haddock. Yeah, like, what am I watching?

Yeah, what is this?

Yeah, everyone knows what it is. Yeah, because if I can't have a name and identity to come back with, I don't, I don't want to see it.

This doesn't happen that often that we're so unanimous in these, and mine have like evolved, I think. Yeah, good for you, girl.

Look at me, growth. All right, now we're gonna do a quick little rapid-fire This or That. Okay, okay, so okay, through the magic, through the magic of editing, I will answer quickly, really quick. Salem Witch Trials or New England Vampire Panic? New England Vampire Panic.

Ah, Salem Witch Trials for me. All right, ghosts or cryptids?

Cryptids. Ghosts. Oh no, I think, I think I'm going with ghosts. Yeah, yeah, I think of a cryptid.

Oh, it's a tough one. It's a tough one. I thought about it as I wrote I thought I knew that one.

See, I'm working with possibilities, okay? So, um, New England Vampire Panic and Salem Witch Trials— we really know a lot about the Salem Witch Trials at this point. I mean, it's been studied ad nauseam. The New England Vampire Panic has so many unanswered questions. True, that's what's more fascinating to me. There's, there's just a crap ton of what in the world caused this to happen. Yeah, we still don't actually know where they got the information to even suggest, well, dig the bodies up and cut them open and look for— Right, like, that was like, where did that come from? The signs they were looking for was known in Europe. Um, there's this weird thing that happened in writing the book. I got, I got about, I don't know, three-quarters of the way through, and I realized I was summing up a bunch of things in one chapter, and I realized, oh, all of those are German details. Oh, just very, very weirdly, those are all like Paracelsus, um, the, the executions where blood was being drunk at the execution site. Like, all of these things were— like, German footprints were everywhere in the room where it happened.

Yeah. And I want to know why. I do. And yeah, that's interesting. The first recorded, uh, New England vampire panic, like, exhumation was late 1700s, like 1790s. And we're talking like a generation after the Revolutionary War. Over. The British brought Hessian mercenaries over. Um, actually, I was in the UK last week, um, was speaking with archaeologists because that's the program that one of my kiddos wants to go into. That's about us. And this archaeologist was dealing with, um, a military site outside of Winchester in southern England that was a staging ground for those Hessian mercenaries as they came over. And I was able to ask would they have brought German physicians with them? Oh, shit. And he said, oh, absolutely. Oh, okay. And it was common for those Hesse mercenaries to get to a place like North America and say, I kind of like it here, I want to stick around.

So there you go.

So my theory, my working theory is that some doctors, it could have only been one or two, stayed after the Revolutionary War and just wandered the countryside helping villages out with medical problems. Oh, shit. And they passed it on to, you know, through practice, they pass some of these beliefs on. By the time you get to like 1790s, it's starting to become a common thing.

That makes a lot of sense. That really does.

So for me, when you say Salem Witch Trials or the New England Vampire Panic, there's so many more questions I want to answer with the vampire panic that that's why I go that way. Yeah, that makes sense.

And then what was the second one you asked me?

Ghosts or cryptids. Cryptids just have more possibility, I feel like. Like, we've been trying to tape and photograph and record ghosts for so long. But we keep finding new species of creatures.

That's what got me like, I was like, there's so much fun with ghosts.

Ghosts are so fun. I know. And a lot of times I feel like cryptids, like you said, it's like just an animal we haven't discovered yet, you know?

Yeah, a little bit of disappointment at the end of that. Yeah.

Oh, it's just a lemur. Yeah, exactly, exactly.

But I want to believe in Bigfoot so much. Yeah, but is he just like a bear? No, I think he's a Bigfoot.

See, a bear that hooked up with like cousinate, I guess. I don't know.

I, I don't know.

Is he some branch of, uh, like Homo erectus? Or like, is it some—

yeah, like, that like didn't evolve in the same way?

Was it the, the Denovians and Neanderthals? And there's all these different branches and there were hybrids. And like, is it from— they just hanging around?

Yeah, it's like Nessie. It is. Because that's is she just hanging around in there, right?

It's true. Yeah, I know, it proves that all these questions, that it is interesting. I'm going to go with cryptids.

I love ghosts. Like, I, if I think it depends also on like what I'm, why I'm choosing. I love ghosts. Yeah, but there is a lot more to ask about cryptids.

I'd like to spend more time with ghosts. That's true. And I've seen ghosts than I know it, so, you know, I, I struggle with that one. I love it. No, I've seen them.

I don't know No, I mean, I struggle with which I'm gonna pick.

Oh, I was like no, no, no.

No, no, no. No, I've seen some of that shit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, galvanism or alchemy? Alchemy. There's just so much more— Across the board, yes.

It's more punk rock, isn't it? Absolutely! Galvanism is somebody sticking a corpse with an electrified rod. Being like moves! But boy, alchemy... Alchemy's cool. That's rock 'n' roll. Fun fact, and I cover this in the book, the Philosopher's Stone wasn't invented by wizards. Stone. It wasn't a rock, it was a powder. So it's like, why? Why they called it a stone? Because it, it had a, um, a stable state. Oh, that makes sense.

Like a stone. Oh, okay. But you always picture like a—

I picture like a smooth stone. Yeah, like a river, a river rock or something. Super smooth.

I could skip it. I could skip the philosopher's stone.

Yeah, alchemy across the board. Yeah. Finally, very last question, number 13. Medieval Germany or Victorian England?

Ooh, medieval Germany. I think I'm—

I would go there too, because again, we know a lot about Victorian England. Yeah, it's fascinating.

Any culture that employed a town executioner. Yeah, yeah, who carried like a 3.5-foot-long sword. Yeah, I want to know about that. I just— tell me more.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. What other weird shit did you do?

Yeah, I gotta know about that.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, look at us, we were unanimous. You were quick too, you were really quick.

We were just watching the episode of Friends last night where Phoebe has that game where she's like, all right, I'm gonna ask you these questions and you have to answer right away. That stresses me out so much. You know, meat or vegetables? Meat. You know, you're going through the thing and, uh, that's what, that's what we just did. That was what that was.

See, you prepared. Rapid fire. You were ready. You didn't even know it. That's fun. That was so much fun. Thank you so much for hanging hanging out with us.

Oh, this was a blast.

Yeah, this was awesome. We have to do this again. We should.

Yeah, I record by myself, so I don't get to talk to other weirdos.

See, you know, we brought you here for that. You're always gonna bring you out of the cave.

Oh, thank you. You're part of us.

Everybody go get Exhumed. You can order it right now. You can pre-order it, and it will be available August 4th.

Yes. Yeah, it's either 4th or the 6th.

I've got— we've got the event on the 4th. We should talk about this. I was just gonna say, we're gonna be at the Wilbur. So obviously we're in the Boston area. There's a great theater in Boston called the Wilbur. In Denver, and seats like 1,000 people. And Elaine is gonna join me there on the 4th, which, is it a Tuesday night? I think it's a Tuesday night. It's like a book with ticket event. So come, you buy your ticket, but you also get the book, and then I'll be there. My philosophy for signing things is I'll stay until everybody's taken care of. That's badass, man. So if you get a book and you want me to sign it, I will sign it for you there. Hell yeah. But we're gonna talk more in depth about it, revisit some of these questions and ideas, and have fun with it. But it's gonna be a blast. It'll be fun. So I'll probably do a reading or something from the book too. Maybe read like the initial false version of her story from the prologue. Oh, I love that. Just to set that up. So that is August 4th.

Pre-order link for the book, tickets for like that event or any of the other book tour events that I've got on my schedule, just go over to aaronmanke.com/exhumed. Yes, perfect. And these amazing ladies will put those links in. Yeah, we will link it. But it's just my name, aaronmanke.com/exhumed. Yeah, you can remember that. The thing that you know that a lot of people don't know is that, um, for pre-orders, like, you could put a book up for pre-order for like 10 months. All of the pre-order sales count toward the very first week of its release for book sales. That's how people hit the New York Times bestsellers list.

It's a big— we gotta get you there.

Pre-order, pre-order, pre-order. Um, I'm begging the Morbid Army to go out there and, and let's go.

Help. And this will come out beforehand, so you know your job.

Yes, you know what you have to do. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah.

All right, well, thank you again for joining us. You're welcome. And everybody, we hope you keep listening, and we hope you keep it weird, but not so weird that you don't preorder Aaron Mickey's book and get him on the New York Times bestseller list of authors. Otherwise, otherwise, I'm going to ship you a hand of glory.

Not the other ones.

Yes, I'll give you a hand of glory otherwise.

Yes. That sounds like a weird— It did sound euphemistic. Yeah, I'm not gonna give anybody a hand of glory.

I won't do that, I promise.