Hey friends,
Welcome to another season of Unruly Figures! Thank you to all the listeners who have been with me for a while now, and thank you to everyone who is just joining us! Because of some scheduling wonkiness, I am starting the new season with a bonus episode, so I’m going to make it free for everyone for a week. Enjoy!
It’s Halloween season, which means all things creepy, crawly, and scary are fair game again. Horror movies are everywhere, all of which I’m too big of a baby to see in theatres. Despite that, I thought it would be fun to cover 11 historical moments that sound like they could be horror movies. Writing this episode gave me the creeps and I definitely had to record during the day, so maybe don’t listen at night if you’re as big a baby as I am. So, let’s dive in.
If you like horror, you might be into these episodes of the podcast:
11. Kentucky Meat Shower
We’re starting light! This one doesn’t strike me as scary, just sort of…unsettling. Around 11 am on March 3, 1876, a Mrs. Crouch was sitting on the porch of her home near Olympia Springs, Kentucky, when meat began to fall from the sky.
Chunks of it. Things that looked like beef. Just…fell from the sky and hit the ground around the Crouch home. Keep in mind, planes were invented in 1903, so I don’t think there was a plane flying overhead and throwing out a bunch of meat on unsuspecting ground dwellers, unless we’re talking about some sort of time slip.
The Crouchs chose not to clean it up, and the next day, witnesses came by to see the leftovers of the meat shower. It had begun to rot by then, but someone apparently tasted it and claimed it tasted like venison or mutton.
The story quickly spread. Just a week later, Allen Crouch was quoted on the front page of the New York Times saying, “The meat, which looked like beef, fell all around her. The sky was perfectly clear at the time, and she said it fell like large snowflakes.”
Samples were collected, preserved in glycerin, and sent to scientists around the country. They put forth various ideas, including a strange cyanobacteria that develops into a gel-like substance in the rain, which was completely unhelpful because it was not raining that day. Eventually, a Dr L. D. Kastenbine wrote in the 1876 edition of the Louisville Medical News that “The only plausible theory explanatory of this anonymous shower appears to me to be…the disgorgement of some vultures that were sailing over the spot.”
Today, this is the generally accepted theory of what happened, though other conspiracy theories do crop up. While rotting meat in your yard doesn’t sound that scary, I can imagine that this would have really freaked out residents.
Horror Movie Pitch:In a quiet Kentucky town, raw chunks of meat begin falling from a clear blue sky. Scientists search for answers — but what if the sky is just… bleeding?
10. The Execution of György Dózsa
I’ve thought about covering the 1514 Peasant’s Revolt against King Vladislaus II of Hungary, but this next death is so gruesome that I’ve never been able to stomach it long enough to write an episode.
In the late 15th/early 16th century in Hungary, the aristocrats gained a lot of power, which they used to squash the rights of the peasants. Discontent grew with no outlet, until the spring of 1514, when an army was called to go on a late Crusade into the Middle East. About 100,000 peasants from the kingdom gathered for the Crusade, but then the plans were cancelled. Despite being dismissed, the large army refused to leave. They used the fact that they had all been gathered “to voice grievances against landlords and refused to disperse or reap the fields at harvest time. The army announced its intention to overthrow the nobility and end oppression of the lower classes.”
And they were very successful, if a bit brutal. According to Encyclopædia Britannica, they captured several fortresses, hundreds of manors were burned to the ground, and “thousands of nobles” were killed. However, they were eventually defeated and their leader, György Dózsa, was captured on July 15, 1514. His execution… this image would haunt me if someone committed it to film. According to the most graphic account of his execution, György was seated on a heated iron throne that was already smoldering and forced to wear a heated iron crown and hold a heated iron scepter. Next, captured rebels who had been starved for days beforehand were forced to eat his cooking flesh directly from his body. Apparently, when the first few people refused, they were summarily executed on the spot, and the others quickly fell into line.
Now. That’s… whew, sickening. I feel like I need an exorcism after reading it aloud. It reminds me of some of the craziest punishments we hear about from the quote-unquote “Dark Ages.” Stuff like the Iron Maiden, which we know is fake, or at least, was not invented until the 19th century. But maybe this execution really happened as is described, which would be horrifying!
The other very real horror of the story, to me at least, is the punishment the peasants were served after. Once the rebellion was fully crushed by October 1514, the king condemned the entire peasant class—not just the rebels and their families, the whole social class—to “real and perpetual servitude” and bound them “permanently to the soil.” The number of days the peasants had to work for their lords was also increased, heavy taxes were imposed on them, and they had to pay for the damage caused by the rebellion.
Horror Movie Pitch:A peasant rebel is captured and forced to sit on a throne of fire, crowned in molten iron, and devoured by hunger and hate — as the world watches and learns nothing.
9. Mary Celeste Ghost Ship
On November 7, 1872, the ship the Mary Celeste set sail from New York City, with 10 people on board: 7 crewmembers, Captain Briggs, his wife, and their two-year-old daughter. In the cargo hold were more than 1,700 barrels of alcohol destined for Genoa, Italy.
Now, historically, winter sailing is not preferred because, you know, the weather is terrible. The Mary Celeste struggled across the ocean, encountering harsh weather. 18 days later, on November 25th, Captain Briggs recorded his final thoughts in the captain’s log, noting that the ship was about 6 nautical miles from the Azores.
And then nothing.
Ten days later, the Mary Celeste was spotted floating aimlessly by the British ship the Dei Gratia. Members of the crew boarded the ship and found it abandoned. The cargo was intact, so not pirates, and all the personal belongings of the crew seemed to be in place. There was a longboat missing, suggesting the ten people aboard had abandoned ship on their own, but the crew of the Dei Gratia couldn’t determine why—yes, there was 3 feet of water in the hold, but that amount should not have caused panic and the ship was clearly still seaworthy—it was floating around on its own 10 days later, after all.
The abandoned ship made modest news at the time, but it wasn’t until Sir Arthur Conan Doyle—yes, of Sherlock Holmes fame—published “J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement” a short story about a survivor of a ghost ship called the Marie Celeste. In his story, a former enslaved person seeking revenge killed the passengers, which, of course, inspired people to think that’s what happened to the original Mary Celeste. There was, however, no sign of foul play on the real ship.
Today, what happened to the crew of the Mary Celeste remains a mystery, but the creep factor of the abandoned ship, in perfect condition, still freaks people out. It has inspired a couple of movies, including Phantom Ship: The Mystery of the Mary Celeste (1935), starring…
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