Dark Tales of Premature Burial with Sarah Blake

Speaker A: Sam.

Speaker B: She was flesh and bone when she went into the ground and she was flesh and bone when she climbed out again. What could be more frightening than awakening deep in the ground several feet of earth above you surrounded by darkness? Who would see your tears or hear your cries? Premature burial was ubiquitous during the 17th and 18th century, as was the fear that this may be your fate. In today's podcast, I'm joined by a special guest where we're going to explore the cases of Marjorie McColl and Essie Dunbar, two women who would be pronounced dead only to come to later, luckily avoiding being buried alive. We're going to explore the history around premature burial and the prevalence of these types of stories. So let's begin by meeting my guest today, Sarah Blake.

Speaker A: Thank you for joining me. Do you want to just say a little bit about yourself and who you are and a little bit about your blog?

Speaker C: Oh, sure. My name is Sarah. I'm from New Jersey, and I am the writer overseer of husheduphistory.com It's a website that I look at bizarre, creepy, weird pieces of history that may have slipped through some of the books that you may not have heard before. So I try to bring the weird to history.

Speaker A: Bringing the weird is always good. And I think you're right. Sometimes those overlooked little pieces of history are really fascinating to reexamine with a different lens and to bring to the attention of people who maybe just don't know about it.

Speaker C: Absolutely.

Speaker A: It really kind of sheds light on life and what life was like for many people 100 years ago, 200 years ago, depending on what kind of period of history that you're looking at.

Speaker C: Absolutely. The process of history classes and history textbooks, and there's a lot left out and a lot of it's fascinating. I mean, what is history if it's not great stories? And who doesn't love a good story?

Speaker A: Absolutely. Completely agree with that. And I completely endorse that as somebody who works in education and teaches children that there is so much that we don't get to do in the classroom. But history is about stories. It's people stories. It's stories from our past. And, yeah, definitely something that we should all be kind of celebrating and trying to raise awareness of in whatever way we can, I think.

Speaker C: Definitely couldn't agree more.

Speaker A: So you wrote across the Feminine Macabre in both volumes one, two, and been a very busy lady.

Speaker C: It's been an absolute pleasure being able to write for Feminine Macabre. I'm so thrilled to be a part of it. And that I'm so happy that Amanda was kind enough to take three my pieces. It's been great. And being introduced to all these other pieces and all these other writers. I love your piece in volume three.

Speaker A: Thank you. Absolutely love it. I kind of felt like ours nestled nicely, almost side by side, because we were looking at death, dying and practices around burial and so on. They did. They kind of went nicely close together in the book.

Speaker C: Yeah, they're nice little book neighbors in there.

Speaker A: But I know we're going to talk about volume three a little bit more today. Do you want to briefly explain what your pieces were about for volume one and volume two? Because they're all very different.

Speaker C: They are, yeah. That's one thing I really try to do with hushed up history is I really try to find different pieces from different locations and different times. I really try to keep it a very varied pieces of work just kind of all over the place. My first piece for Feminine Macabre was, to sum it up briefly, it was about a guy who, like so many people, want to prove life after death, but he took it really far and didn't let his assistant know how far he was willing to take that pursuit. And we may never know whether he was successful in what he found after his experiments.

Speaker A: I was just going to say I loved it. I absolutely loved it. You can always tell those pieces that you really do enjoy when you come away from reading it. I mean, I have postit notes stuck all over every single one of the journals ones that I really loved. I came away and I'd have to go and listen to the piece of music or go and find out some more about it and really dive into it a little bit. You know, that's a real testimony to what it is that Amanda is creating, but also all of the amazing contributors and how much passion and enthusiasm they've put to each of their essays.

Speaker C: In creating something unique, you really can feel it jump off the page. You can really tell that these pieces are written by people who are genuinely invested and love what they do, what they research. And you can really tell that when you're reading something. And I love that. I love that you can read something and you can really tell, like, this person's into this, that heart of it. It just enhances it so much more. I love when that happens.

Speaker A: So volume two?

Speaker C: Volume two was it might be one of my favorites just because it is so just what volume two was my story about the sinister stove of Spain. There was a family whose stove started speaking to them and telling them things and having conversations that weren't super nice, weren't things that you'd want to really hear from anybody, let alone your stove. And it got a lot of attention. Law enforcement got involved. They tried to figure out what this was, and they never did. And it just kind of stopped one day. So the Sinister Stove of Spain was my second contribution to the feminine.

Speaker A: You know, sometimes the stove can be sinister all by itself. They can have a license. You have every intention of something going in and it coming out a certain way, and it just doesn't but this was a whole other type, sinister and weird. It was one I had never, ever heard of.

Speaker C: That was one that I keep a very large running list of things to type about at some point. And when Amanda put out the call for volume two, I'm like, let's do the stove.

Speaker A: I'm glad it made because I just felt it was so unique. Like I said, I have never heard that story, but I've never heard anything similar to it either. Yeah, very unique.

Speaker C: Weird talking stove. Yeah, sure.

Speaker A: There's many things you could say about it.

Speaker C: There it is.

Speaker A: It's one that people really do have to read because it's fascinating. And like you said, it caught a lot of attention from police, from the locals, the community, and it just stopped.

Speaker C: Yeah, okay.

Speaker A: Very strange.

Speaker C: Yeah, very weird. Probably one of my favorites that I found digging around online. It was just like, oh, yeah, we're going to talk about the stove for this one.

Speaker A: And this is the beauty of what you do. Like you said, you pick pieces that are very different to research and to write about, both for your blog and across the feminine carb. And so coming into volume three, you've got something completely different, again, where you are exploring the stories of Marjorie McColl and Essie Dunbar, who, again, just completely different, kind of tell us a little bit about their stories about these women and what they had in common with each other.

Speaker C: Sure. Essie Dunbar and Marjorie McCall. Marjorie McCall. The reason I even found out about Marjorie McCall was there is a photo online that has made its way through various websites. And whatnot and what caught my eye was at the bottom, it says, lived once, buried twice. So immediately I was like, what is that about? Marjorie McCall and Essie Dunbar were two people that unfortunately were subjected to premature burials. And the crazy thing about Marjorie McCall and Essie Dunbar, it's like the crazy part about their story. You think it's bad enough that they were buried prematurely, but then you find out that the crazy part of the story is that they got out of their graves and lived. So it's a strange twist on something that's already a horrific story. And it's not what you expect to hear, unfortunately. It's not the ending that many, many people got if they very horribly, tragically got involved in premature burial. But these two, they survived and they lived after it. And like I said, it's just a crazy twist on something that was already crazy.

Speaker A: And they were from completely different parts of the world. Essie Dunbar from the States and Marjorie McCall's from Ireland, wasn't she? So completely different parts of the world, and like you said, just had this very unique story in that, unlike a lot of stories involving premature burials, these women actually survived. They in different ways, got out of their graves and carried on living a normal life, as normal as can be after what had happened to it's. Fascinating. Yeah, I found myself just diving into it and rereading it several times, just really intrigued with the kind of the different commentary that you were making and questions that you were asking about these women and the stories themselves. It was fascinating, but it's a part of history that was actually common. So your piece made me think of the story of Mary Howe, which similar, different, same kind of concerns around premature burial. Know, just identifying death. It kind of highlights just how difficult it was back then to do this. And for anybody that hasn't heard the story of Mary Howe, she was a spiritualist who would go into like a trance like state to do her mediumship. And on one of those occasions, she basically remained in that state for a couple of, you know, the doctors were called to see if she was okay, to see if she had passed away. And when they came to see her, they basically were in a bit of a conundrum because there were so many signs of death. She wasn't moving, she wasn't breathing, but she also wasn't showing signs of decomposition and a lot of those other kind of things that you would see in someone that had passed away. So the kind of struggle between the family and the doctor who doctor wanted to pronounce her dead and have her buried, and the family were like, are we really certain that she has passed away? Because she does this all the time. And it eventually led to the doctor just saying, no, she's passed, we need to bury her. And the family getting quite insistent and upset about it. And what you had was the doctor kind of overruling them and organizing her to be removed from the home to be buried. But the community itself was so concerned that they might be burying someone who was still alive because of the questions around this, that people refused to do it. And so the doctor was left basically to dig the grave himself. And he was concerned that people would go back to that grave and resurrect her, dig her back up because they thought she was alive, that he placed her in an unmarked grave so that her burial would be hidden from the community to prevent her being resurrected. And it's still kind of part of the legend and the law of this community, was she alive? Was she passed away? And it really does say something about the fears of the day and the difficulty in detecting death, the uncertainty of it, even within the medical kind of profession.

Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, it's something that today it sounds so strange. Like what do you mean? Like you're questioning whether someone is alive or dead. I mean, back then, like I said, it was a very real possibility. There was so many unknowns to the medical profession. Marjorie McCall's husband was a doctor, and there was just so many things, there were so many variables, there were so many unknowns at the time that that's why this was such a very real, very possible fear in people's lives.

Speaker A: And it's something that we would find difficulty in kind of wrapping our head around. But like you said, it was so incredibly commonplace. I mean, I can think of an example in Oxfordshire, where I live of a woman who was found guilty of infanticide, and her name was Anne Green, if I remember correctly, and she was basically put on trial, found guilty and sentenced to death. And in the UK, if anybody's read my piece, when someone was found guilty of murder, they were not only hung, but then their body was taken to shire halls to infirmaries, where the doctors, the surgeons in that community basically carried out an autopsy, but a public autopsy. And Anne Green's body, after she'd been hanging for 30 minutes, pronounced dead, was taken to this shire hall. And you had the surgeons in this great big hall surrounded by hundreds of people who were coming flocked to see this autopsy. He's getting all of his instruments ready and he's about to place the first blade on her chest and to begin this autopsy, and she sits upright in front of the entire auditorium of people and surgeons, and they were just unfounded.

Speaker C: Can you imagine sitting in that room, horrified?

Speaker A: I mean, I think I probably would have passed out. It's terrifying to think about.

Speaker C: It's just layer after layer after layer of just horror right there.

Speaker A: Like doctors, before they would start other autopsies, they'd do things like rub nettles on the inside of their mouths to see if the blistering from the nettle would kind of prompt that person to wake up if they were still alive. I mean, just it's it's horrible to think about on on all levels. It's terrifying. Yeah.

Speaker C: And I I remember reading somewhere that in the early 19 hundreds, I mean, there were cases of premature burials averaging once a week. And then to have that extra layer of concern of live autopsies. Like I said, it was just a whole other layer of stress and fear on top of death.

Speaker A: And you can understand why it was such a kind of common fear, because death was very prevalent. Oh, yeah, mortality rates high. You are lucky if you lived to adulthood. Disease, infection, illness were rampant. But obviously, medical understanding wasn't what it was either. And if you were lucky, you might have access to someone in the medical field, but if you were living in smaller rural communities or in places where you didn't even have that, it was your loved ones, it was the community, it was your family who were responsible for burial, for deciding if you had passed away. And so if doctors were having difficulty identifying death, then you've got the same for the common person in kind of determining that, too. So just terrifying.

Speaker C: Yeah. I mean, death was a very close neighbor back then. It seems like today, as much as we know about it now, as much study, and we know so much more about it, but there's a strange kind of distance that a lot of people kind of keep it at arm's length today. There's still very much a sense of fear and unknowing, but it's a very different type of fear and unknowing. And it was interesting when I was reading your piece in Feminine Macabre about the concern that people had about the right kind of burial, the proper burial. My day job is I work at a crematory. And when the COVID Pandemic was raging, that was something we heard a lot. There was a lot of concern from families, Catholic families, about the proper burial and is this the right way to do this? Does this ensure peacefelt, transition into the afterlife? It was so not funny. That's not the right term. But reading your piece, I was like, oh, this is very familiar. So it's still something around today.

Speaker A: Absolutely. And I think you can see those same elements like you were just mentioning with the COVID Pandemic. But when you think about concerns around organ donation, very concerned that that's something that they just don't want to do in case it affects their resurrection into the afterlife.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker A: You can see these threads and how they followed through history. And often when we look back at the past, we kind of see it and we see it as being something different. We have that disconnect. But actually, when you really do examine it and unpick these things, you can see those same threads that follow through those same concerns about death, about life, about what happens to us afterwards.

Speaker C: Today, the pages are written in a different color ink, but the stories are similar.

Speaker A: Absolutely.

Speaker C: There's threads there that are just you can't deny that there still are these similarities for these ideas that we may think of as being so far back and so ancient and so oh, that has nothing to do with us anymore. It absolutely does. There's so many instances where the connect is there, and it's there strong, much stronger than a lot of people realize.

Speaker A: I agree. And just thinking about what you were saying about people's concerns around the pandemic and proper burial for their loved ones, again, you can see those same things echoed in so many other instances of history. I mean, it made me think about the burials that took place during the Black Death. Right. And even recently, there was the sites uncovered in Marseille where, when the plague ships arrived, marseille was basically inundated with the plague. It spread like wildfire, and there were over 100,000 people who succumbed very quickly to the disease. Now they were presented with a very real problem. That number of dead bodies is not easy to manage anyway. But they couldn't afford to wait for burial to see.

Speaker C: Exactly.

Speaker A: They had to get rid of the bodies very quickly. You had mass graves being dug and bodies put into them. But in this one particular place in Ross, they were basically carrying out excavation because they were getting ready to build new buildings on top of what used to be this old monastery site. And they came across basically this pit with hundreds of skeletons.

Speaker C: Wow.

Speaker A: And in examining the skeletons, it revealed so much about that period of time you had.

Speaker C: Right. That's such a huge volume of information for so many different fields.

Speaker A: Yeah, they showed like, evidence of autopsy. So you saw kind of work that had been carried out on the skull post death, but one of the skeletons revealed kind of embedded under the toe. So basically where the nail bed would have been found in the skeleton, this long brass pin. And what evidence of was the doctors back then in Marseille obviously having to deal with the overwhelming number of bodies still concerned about, well, has this person passed away? And so, of course, it's very real, tangible evidence of something left behind from the process of checking to see if.

Speaker C: That person had wow, that's incredible. This little brass pin, they probably never didn't give. It was just, oh, all right, we got to check, not thinking that how many hundreds of years later that's such a vital little chunk of information to tell about that time. Just something so everyday common incidental to them. And it's just a huge piece of evidence today for something like that and.

Speaker A: Still shows that concern that they were doing their best under really terrible circumstances to do the right thing. People. And you're right, it just revealed so much. I mean, obviously the intention wasn't for it to be left in the course when they placed this body in this pit as part of this mass burial, but just so revealing. And you can see the images. There's wonderful kind of journals about it online that you can read. I think I read it in a journal in Oxford. And it's just fascinating. I mean, it is absolutely fascinating to see, like you said, that little window into that moment of history and what it reveals, it's amazing.

Speaker C: But it's just something so tiny that's something so big so many years later, it's amazing.

Speaker A: It really does highlight just how prevalent this fear of premature burial and how real a fear it was across 17th and 18th century. It was rife. And like you said, there were so many cases documented, it was common, and most people didn't have the outcome described in your piece about Marjorie McCollum, Essie Dunbar. Unfortunately, who knows how many people didn't have such a positive outcome? We'll never know because that's not something you're going to necessarily have the documentation for. So given how kind of ubiquitous the sphere was across this particular period. Do you have any favorite methods of trying to detect death or inventions that were created? Because there were an awful lot of different things that people tried to incorporate into burial to act as some kind of detection or so many guarding message. I mean, there were so many different.

Speaker C: I have to admit I've gotten kind of fascinated with looking at some of these old patents because some of them were basic. They would have a bell or a flag, but you had these other ones that got very elaborate with glass spheres placed on someone's chest so that if they inhaled, the glass sphere would touch something to trigger a flag or a bell or a tube to open up or a hatch to open. It's amazing to see how much effort and how much thought was put into these things. But I mean, at the same time, it also still goes back to saying or seeing how little they knew about the medicine of death because you had these glass balls on people's chest not realizing that the bodies change as they decompose. So there was a lot of instances where these mechanisms would be triggered. They would say, oh, my God, someone's alive. They would run to go dig them up. And it wasn't that they were alive, it was just the body shifted and set off these mechanisms. So it's fascinating. It's fascinating to see all these efforts and all these devices and all these things that they tried and just to know that it didn't always work. It's crazy. I read one that which I think it would freak me out even more. There was one patent where they would put portholes in the casket so that if someone did wake up, they thought that would comfort them being able to see out. I'm like, I wouldn't want to see out. No, I would want to just ring the bell or talk up to the tube. I don't think I'd want to look out of portal.

Speaker A: No, I agree with you. I think there would be nothing more terrifying than having visual of it all whilst you're waiting.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker A: No, I'm okay.

Speaker C: Thank you.

Speaker A: But it's fascinating. I mean, you were talking about ringing the bell. That really simple idea of just having something attached to their finger that would ring above and the person in charge of looking after the cemetery if they heard it, obviously going and seeing what was the matter and seeing if that person was alive by digging them up.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker A: You see how those things have kind of impacted on culture today. That phrase saved by the bell, many think it stems from these kind of safeguards that they put in place to try and prevent premature burial.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker A: And again, when you then look at language and see that kind of connection, it's fascinating that these have made their way into our common vocabulary, our common culture, and yet many people aren't aware of that connection with this really quite.

Speaker C: Macabre aspect of even though the threat of premature burial is far less today than it used to be. These little pieces of it kind of like the pin that you were just talking about. They stuck around. They're still here. And they speak to a past that we're not as familiar with, but there's pieces of it. It's still here, whether we're talking about it or holding it.

Speaker A: Definitely. I'm like you. I think they're fascinating to explore. All the different kind of coffins that were designed and built and then all these different weird methods that were kind of created by the medical community too. To look at a body and say, well, this is what I do to check to see if that person is I mean, there were some really quite bizarre things that they would do to a body to ensure that that person had passed away. I think my favorite, not that I would ever want it to be done to me, right, was this French doctor who would use a pipe filled with tobacco smoke and it was basically used as almost like an enema so it would be blown into the bottom of the deceased person, this tobacco smoke. Now just think about that. The grotesqueness of this. Someone was blowing through tobacco science into someone's bottom. And it was only when they must have done this how many times, that they thought, we need a mechanism that's going to not going to involve manually.

Speaker C: Blow the smoke in the thought and the work, because there was work that went into that. That's amazing.

Speaker A: And these were the scholars of the day. These were the educated people within the medical fields coming up with these things.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker A: I just think if this is what they were doing now, you really can understand why the common person next door might have difficulty in deciding if their wife or their husband or whatever has passed.

Speaker C: Mean. The guys who founded the London Association for the Prevention of Premature Burial, they wrote a book and from what I haven't seen a copy of it myself, from what I understand, it's a large book and it's called Premature Burial and How It May Be Prevented. And again, from what I understand, I haven't seen it myself yet, but in it there's all kinds of accounts of things that were done to determine if someone was alive or dead. And it's something like I can't imagine the stories that are in there.

Speaker A: But just to think about the place it has within medical history without all of their work and their kind of research into it got to think where we would be without it, really? Because that kind of detailed attention that they had to put on it is sure to have enhanced the kind of the medical practices that we know today. Absolutely.

Speaker C: I mean, it might sound crazy, it might sound ridiculous. We can laugh about it now, but undoubtedly even the craziest things they did were still building blocks. They were still steps in a better direction on trying to solve this issue.

Speaker A: And in 100 years time, people are going to be looking at what we do, I'm sure, and thinking, really, that's what they did for how macabre, how backward.

Speaker C: Yeah, like you said, we're going to look back today, even said, I work at a crematory. And even now there's a lot of chatter about how to better that process. We should be able to do this without doing it this way. So there's still a whole lot of thought and work being put into burial practices and practices of what to do with someone when they die. Again, I think a lot of times we think now that we're at like, oh, we figured that out, we know what to do now, and it's not the case. We're still looking for ways to do things better or differently, especially now there's issues where burials take up land. So that's another thing that people are trying to figure out. So it's definitely still a very active question walk that we're on.

Speaker A: And I think you can see the question around how to deal with deceased bodies. When you think about the kind of carbon footprint, the environmental questions, with everything very much as a hot topic in terms of our global community and doing everything we can to preserve the planet and kind of rein back some of the damage that's being done, you can see these questions being asked in so many different fields. Death and dying, and burial is one of them. And you made a really important point, I think that we stand at a point and we think we understand it and we've got it. But so did these doctors and people 100 years ago, 150 years ago, they thought they had it nailed, too. They thought they understood it enough to be able to deal with it.

Speaker C: The doctor that you were just speaking about previously, who was like, no, she's dead. Yeah, he was just as certain in his practices as we think we are today. And it's not something that has a stop. I think this is something I mean, death is always going to be around. It's something that people are always going to have to deal with. And I think that just means that that's something that we're constantly going to be working with. I don't think there's really an endpoint to seek out, really.

Speaker A: And this is kind of a topic, it's part of your essay that I think the more you look into this, that you go down other paths and there's other strands to it and it's like a maze. There are just so many elements that you can kind of get hooked into because it was such a broad, fascinating part of life. You can examine it for what doctors were doing, advances. In science, what it was revealing about superstitions and fears of the day, how corpses were handled at death, what they did to try and prevent premature burial. There's so many things that you can look at as well as then the real tangible stories that came out of them.

Speaker C: There's a lot of branches there to explore for a lot of different fields.

Speaker A: Like I said, that's where you get your postit notes out, if you're like me, and just like, start.

Speaker C: Exactly.

Speaker A: That's what's fascinating about history and kind of looking at these things again, it's being able to explore them and just seeing how fascinating it is. It really is something special to look at and to understand and start to piece together.

Speaker C: Yeah, in the grand scheme of things, this wasn't that long ago, really. So just to look back at that, to see just the advancement that's happened in such a considerably short amount of time, it's fascinating. It can be horrifying, but it's fascinating. And it teaches and it really hopefully opens door to a lot of those other branches to look at and learn from.

Speaker A: And I think it helps us to really critically analyze parts of history and what it reveals. And that's something that I don't think we should ever lose. And I think this kind of tinges on something else that I think you did so well in your piece, which was to ask that very real question of are these events around these two women? Did they happen like this? What's the truth? What's the fact? What's maybe elements of story? Because there are stories like this everywhere, and documentation wasn't always great. Stories could change depending on the speaker, how it was written down, who told it. And so sometimes there isn't records. They might not be the kinds of records that we have today that you have in registries, certificates, records at a church, whatever. You don't necessarily have those same tangible pieces to verify. And so you were asking and examining that difficulty that we have with these types of history.

Speaker C: Yeah, it makes me wonder too, because how today we seem to be moving in a direction well, if not seem to, we are moving in a direction where we rely very heavily on digital records and things that we cannot physically hold in our hands as historic records. But we have so many instances where we're losing information because things are deteriorating, things are not being properly cared for. So you hear all these stories from way back when about like, well, how come they didn't have a record? How can there be no records? There's 1000 reasons why they may not have had records. And it makes me wonder, 100, 200 years down the road, are we going to be running into those same questions of, well, how could there have not been a record? And it's like, well, because there never was one. It was never on paper. So how do we keep that information for these things that are going on. Again, it's a problem that happened in the past, but it's a problem that we're going to see again. It's another connection.

Speaker A: And I think there are people who will look at those stories of these two women and similar stories from other parts of the world that without that kind of tangible piece of documentation won't see the story and believe it, they won't think that it's factual. And I think some of these histories, these stories that are about everyday people and what happened to them in life and in death get lost because there isn't that written record. Yeah, I think what's great is that.

Speaker C: You'Re this pursuit of proof, but what if there was no means of putting that proof on paper? Does that just mean it gets lost? Like it doesn't deserve to just get lost just because it couldn't? There's so many factors that would go into that. And it's just like you said, the everyday person, what happens to their stories.

Speaker A: And just because there isn't that concrete piece of documentation, I think we have to look at these as a kind of history, as a different type of history, where, no, you may not have certain piece of evidence to back it up. But just the fact that this story exists and the story exists so prevalently across cultures, across countries, what does that reveal? What is it showing you? What is it telling you? You can look for the very real kind of community stories and sense of superstition and fear that that just kind of highlights they reveal things. You just got to be able to look at it with again, that critical eye of what is it showing me, what is it telling me about what people were talking about. There is a reason why that story became so popular, right?

Speaker C: Where did it come from and why.

Speaker A: It had to come from somewhere. Now, there may be parts of the story that have changed and have been adapted and aren't necessarily something that happened exactly as we know of it today, but the story is there for a reason. And like you just said, it has to have come and has to have started from somewhere.

Speaker C: There's got to be that little kernel that it came from. There's got to be a seed somewhere that this came from.

Speaker A: And I think those are the important parts that we have to remember and hold on to. Not to just dismiss it, but to see the truth that is there buried in the story. Yes, some of it will have been embellished. Yes, it's going to have changed, but it's going to have come from somewhere. And that's really revealing, I think.

Speaker C: Yeah, I've run into that with stories for Hushed. There's been handfuls of stories where at one point in time I started Hushed eight years ago and there's been a good handful of stories that I was like well, I don't know if I can write this because I don't have anything that's absolutely definite that says this happened. I've changed that a little bit because, like we were just discussing, there's a lot of stuff that happened that, yes, I haven't been able to find a scan of a sheet of paper that said this, this, and this. But I have a whole lot of stories and accounts, and those have to count for something. So I've definitely kind of shifted when I look at stuff to write for. Hush in terms of there's a reason that this exists, let me try to look into that and see what I can do with it.

Speaker A: Tapping into that and seeing what that reveals about community, about life within communities, within families and how they preserved evidence. And these weren't necessarily people that were going to be writers who were going to take out some journal somewhere and record it meticulously and then pass it from family member to family member. These were stories that were told. They were passed down from one generation to another and from one community generation to another. And that's the kind of journey that these stories have taken. It's a different type of telling.

Speaker C: It makes you really wonder about the changing nature of evidence and what was evidence back then and what was the hard copy to someone back then, as opposed to what we think of it being today. They're very different, very different ideas, but it absolutely does not mean one is more valid than the other.

Speaker A: Agree. And I think we also have to be kind of smarter at looking at the evidence that we can see that's within our communities that exists that kind of validate these stories. Again, not a piece of documentation that's recorded somewhere that's been preserved, but there is evidence of know, the gravestone, that marker that you mentioned, those words speak of history. They're speaking of an event, and they're also revealing something. They're kind of validating that there is something here, that there is the story somewhere.

Speaker C: Right? Like, if that little piece wasn't on Marjorie McCall's tombstone, lived once, buried twice, would we know about it as much as now? And I mean, even Essie Dunbar, essie Dunbar had a similar situation. Know, there was a lot of stories, a little small snippets in the newspaper. And at one, I believe it had to be her obituary. That just the little way it was phrased. I believe it was phrased as the final burial of SC Dunbar. Why else would it be phrased like that?

Speaker A: It has to come from somewhere. And again, that's the kind of very critical eye that you have to have when examining these things. And evidence can be so many different things. And if we're thinking about future evidence, kind of footprint that we leave behind in terms of social media and all of these different platforms that kind of allow us to have our lives on display. Those are going to be evidence for future generations to look at and consume how we lived our lives. It's just a different viewpoint. It's just a different way of looking at life. They have their stories. They were a huge part of their community. And like we've said through the podcast, those are something that shouldn't be forgotten because they're really revealing and likewise those things within the community. And that could be newspapers, it could be grave markers, it could be so many different things. I mean, I know of the there was a piece of research done in Germany around precisely this type of story, and there was one family, and I cannot recall the name, german is not my best names and it was this very aristocratic, wealthy family name. So I apologize, I can't remember. It so similar to Marjorie McCall's story, and it was prevalent across Germany. The only differences that you had were that when the woman of this household, when someone tried to remove her finger to take the ring off, when she came to and ventured through the town in order to make her way back home, people shunned her because they saw her as this ghostly specter. She was wearing her shroud, she was very pale. So they saw her as this apparition trying to gain entry into their homes. And that was a real superstition. It was a real fear that the dead could come back, try and gain entry into your household. So they had all those weird rituals to confuse the ghost so that spirits wouldn't come back home. But she eventually makes her way back home and she knocks on her husband's door. And unlike Marjorie McCall's husband, who's a little bit shocked and eventually lets her in this particular German woman, her husband doesn't. He keeps her outside for quite some time. And he's calling out all of these things, saying, you are an abomination of gold. You are something evil, and I will not let you in until this strange, bizarre event happens where basically the horses from outside burst through the door. So, yes, this story, the horses do precisely that. They burst through the doors, they make their way upstairs. And he has this kind of epiphany, thinks that God is sending him this sign that this is his wife returned to him. And of course, then he embraces her, lets her in, and they live happily ever after.

Speaker C: Imagine that you're just trying to get home and you're bagging on the door and you're told no, because everybody thinks you're a ghost.

Speaker A: But what is fascinating about this German story is that if you look at the community that it comes from, there is this kind of large tower that was built in kind of commemoration of the family. And it has horse sculptures, these large horse sculptures that are part of the and there was a body of research kind of carried out in like the 1920s where they examined cities, towns all over Germany, and they found this same story, or variations of this same story across 19 other cities.

Speaker C: 19 other cities. Wow.

Speaker A: Where the story was almost identical. And in eleven of them, they had similar structures where you had horses as part of sculptures on buildings. And that's fascinating to see, not only kind of how these stories might have impacted on the community itself in terms of architecture that's been left behind as some kind of record of it, but also to see how we've got this connection across other cities, other towns.

Speaker C: Yeah, it has to say something.

Speaker A: And you're going to find things like this the more you look at it, because it was so prevalent. And you can see how stories spread, how they became part of local culture, but also then how you have stories that are completely different, but again with this same kind of truth to them about premature burial, about death, dying, and about so many other aspects. The more you look into them, it's a wild kind of bit of history. And I think if it's something that interests you, once you start, you can't stop because it's so revealed.

Speaker C: There's so much. Yeah.

Speaker A: And I love that this is what you really showcase with your blog. The weird, the wonderful, the macabre, those kind of twisted little bits of history and truth and bizarre nuggets that we shouldn't forget because they're a part of why we are where we are today.

Speaker C: Yeah, no, thank you so much. I appreciate that more than I can tell you. I really appreciate that. And that was what I hoped to do with Hushed. I mean, Hushed Up history came about because well, it came out because I was stubborn, but the reason it came about was because I was writing for another website, and I kept finding all these crazy stories, and I'm like, listen, let me write this, let me write this, let me write this. And they kept turning them down, and the reason they kept turning them down, they're like, listen, it's not that we don't think this is great. This is a great story. The reason we're turning it down is because it's not a story that has a historical marker or a place that someone can go and see a physical memorial or look it up on a map and go visit. And I was like, but that's not fair and it's not true.

Speaker A: It's also not true.

Speaker C: So Hush literally was born of me being like, oh, and I'm going to do it myself, and just finding all of these incredible, crazy stories that I'm like, why aren't these somewhere? I mean, granted, I'm not talking like Hushed is this big known entity or anything, but I'm like, this is a crazy story. I got to do something with it. So that's what happened. Like I said, I try really hard to kind of go all over the place, whether it's geographically subject matter. I try to really get a big mix of all kinds of stuff because it's everywhere. These kinds of crazy stories are in no way, shape or form exclusive to any one part of the world or culture or anything. It's all over the place. There's just so many stories to find and I love finding them and typing them up and just putting them on my little itty bitty corner of the internet so people can hopefully find them and read them and read a good story.

Speaker A: And we will make sure that we put your details in the podcast and up on the website and everything so.

Speaker C: People can be awesome. Thank you.

Speaker A: And read more of your pieces because Feminine Macabre is just a tiny little snippet of the body of work being put out there. And if you've loved those pieces and if you've loved listening to what we've been talking about today, then you are going to love hushed up history. It's just phenomenal. So we will definitely make sure we get that content up on the podcast and on the website so that people can come.

Speaker C: And thank you so much because it's.

Speaker A: Very worthy of that. You know, I am so glad that Amanda has put you in The Feminine Macabre in all three volumes. I hope you continue to write and I see you in future volumes.

Speaker C: Oh, I hope so. Know Amanda has been so kind and so awesome for I'm so thankful that she's let me submit these crazy stories and know published just I'm so happy to be a part of it. I'm so thankful for it.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think she's amazing for what she's doing and how she's bringing people together to give them that little platform to air their voice, to air what they think, to air what they found out. And it's fascinating. Each page is a different story. Each page is a different voice.

Speaker C: There's so much in there. It's so great between those three volumes. It's like, listen, if you are even remotely interested in anything under this huge umbrella, you will find something in here.

Speaker A: And you'll find that you read one piece and it resonates with something else and it makes you want to go back and look at that again.

Speaker C: Right?

Speaker A: And that connects with something else. I mean, I was only talking to someone else for a different podcast episode a few days ago and it had nothing to do with The Feminine Macabre. It had nothing to do with it whatsoever. But this conversation, there was just this moment where I was just like this resonates so much with what this person was saying and it was just you find yourself doing that all the time. You make connections. It opens your kind of thinking a little bit. It broadens it a little bit and makes you ask different types of questions because you're being given access to so much material and it's so yeah, it's.

Speaker C: Such an awesome spider web of stuff.

Speaker A: It's a spider web. It's fantastic. So, yeah, I hope you continue to put yourself out there and hopefully get into some future volumes, because I'll definitely and you will know that when I'm reading it, I'll be there with postit notes.

Speaker C: I've got a list of three or four things that I would love to submit to the future. The next volume coming up. I just got to decide which one to go with.

Speaker A: I've got an idea. I just don't know if I have the time. I really hope I have the time because it's something that it's a real burning little section of my brain that really wants to have this story told and this little bit of history examined. So if it doesn't make it into The Feminine Macabre or any other future volume, it's probably going to become a podcast because it's fascinating, but sometimes high means you just don't have the time.

Speaker C: Right? No, I understand that 100%. I do.

Speaker A: I have loved talking to you, Sarah. I could literally spend an eternity chatting to you about all things dark history and macabre history and weird, wonderful and strange and OD.

Speaker C: Thank you so much for chat. This was awesome.

Speaker A: It was such a blast. Great Saturday, wasn't it? Morning, afternoon, getting to talk about death and dying and burial and premature burial. Yeah, Saturday really.

Speaker C: Light.

Speaker A: Saturday afternoon, definitely a little light conversation.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker A: But I hope people have enjoyed listening and have come away learning something about this and are inspired to maybe go and find out some more about these stories or read The Feminine Macabre, if they haven't already.

Speaker C: There's so much out there. There's so much worth reading and there's so many stories that just want to be read and heard and told.

Speaker A: And this is why I wanted to do the podcast. I wanted to tell people stories, whether it was paranormal, whether it was dark history, whether it was this kind of overlooked, forgotten part of something. That's what I wanted to do. So I really appreciate that you've come along today and helped to reveal some really amazing stories.

Speaker C: Absolutely. Thank you so much for asking me to talk and chat and be a part of your project again. I'm so thankful to have these types of connections and to talk with you about this. Like I said, this was a blast. I had a great time. Thank you so much.

Speaker A: It's an open door. You're welcome anytime. If you got something burning that you want to come and talk about, just send me a message and we can chat again.

Speaker C: That'd be awesome.

Speaker A: Great.

Speaker C: That'd be great. I have so many things yeah.

Speaker A: That's like me. My list gets longer of all the things I want to talk about. I'm never going to have the time to do this in my lifetime. I know.

Speaker C: And anytime that I'm trying to figure out the next thing to write about, hushed. I'll be like, on the couch and I'll just be like, what do I want to write about next? And my boyfriend's like, don't you have, like, 300 something things? I'm like, yeah, but I just found this other thing and that's really cool too.

Speaker A: Kindred spirits here. We understand the pain that we both suffer. Absolutely.

Speaker C: I understand what you're saying 1000%.

Speaker A: It was such a delight talking to you and I will hope.

Speaker C: Oh, you too. This was great.

Speaker A: I'll say goodbye, everyone. Bye, everyone.

Speaker C: Bye.

Speaker A: If you like this podcast, there's a number of things you can do. Come and join us on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. Spread the word about us with friends and family. Leave a review on our website or other podcast platforms to support the podcast further, why not head on over to join us on Patreon, where you can sign up to gain a library of additional material and recordings and in the process, know you're helping the podcast continue to put out more content? On a final note, if you haven't read it already, then you can find my piece In Search of the Medieval in volume three of The Feminine Macabre over on Spookeats.com or via Amazon. Links to the book will also be in the episode description. Thank you, everyone, for your amazing support.