May 5, 2020 • 10 mins
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Aaron Menkey's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
I Heart Radio and Grim and Mild. Our world is
full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book,
all of these amazing tales are right there on display,
just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet
(00:28):
of Curiosities. It's possible to live somewhere all your life
and not know everything about it. When we moved to
a new place, much of what we learned about it
is gleaned from exploration. There might be hidden treasure within
the walls of a home or buried in the backyard.
(00:51):
For the Avery family in eighteen sixty one, that treasure
wasn't just inside the home, The whole place was a
gold mine. Daniel Dudley Avery was a legal dollar from
Baton Rouge. In eighteen thirty one, he married into the
Marsh family, a wealthy clan of landowners with their own
island near the Gulf of Mexico. The Marshes turned the
island into a sugar plantation, as its soil and climate
(01:12):
provided ideal growing conditions. But years later, after Daniel had
become the sole owner of his in Law's empire, he
made some changes. First, he renamed the island Avery Island. Next,
he started digging around, eventually stumbling upon a salt mine
deep underground. Avery didn't know that the Native Americans who
had originally owned the island used to harvest the salted
(01:33):
trade with other tribes in neighboring states, but there it was.
With his newly discovered income stream resting just below his feet,
Avery started mining the island for its salt. At the time,
two major events in his life happened. His daughter Mary
Eliza Avery married a banker named Edmund Mcilhanny, and the
Civil War just began. The Confederate soldiers in the South
(01:57):
needed salt desperately. It wasn't just used to season food.
Salt was a powerful preservative, and the horses liked it too.
Avery got into the business of providing the Confederacy with
barrels of it until the Union eventually took control of
the island in an operation known as the Great Salt Expedition.
With the island compromised, Edmund fled with Mary to Texas,
(02:19):
where he worked in finance for the Confederacy. After the
South lost, Edmund was suddenly out of a job. He
moved with his family back to Avery Island, performing odd
jobs around the plantation. His primary task was maintaining the garden,
where Edmund took to growing all sorts of vegetables, including peppers.
A friend of his, Mansell White, had gifted the former
(02:42):
banker a bushel of peppers and a recipe to use them,
so Edmund planted the peppers for years. He tended to them,
building them up into a viable crop which he could
use in his recipe and then sell to folks on
the mainland. He would pulp the peppers into a mash,
then age them in jars over the ruse of a month,
after which he'd pour in some vinegar and let the
(03:03):
jars sit for another thirty days. Once the pepper mash
had finished fermenting, Edmund would pour the sauce into glass
cologne bottles and top them off with the cork stopper.
And then he would travel all throughout the Gulf coast
selling his product to anyone looking to add a little
flavor to their lives. Each bottle came with a little
sprinkler attachment that made it easier to add it to food,
(03:26):
and it seems the product was a hit. In his
first year, he sold over six fifty of them for
just a dollar apiece. Originally, many customers found the sauce
too spicy. They didn't understand that it wasn't like other sauces,
which could be applied to food with wild abandon. Their
delicate palets just hadn't adjusted to the spiciness. But once
(03:47):
they did, they couldn't get enough of it. The sauce
was so popular Edmund's company kept making it and continues
to do so today. Although some things have changed in
the old day is every pepper used in the sauce
was grown right there on Avery Island. Today, though the
peppers are harvested from all over South America and Africa,
(04:08):
where the climate is better suited to larger crops. The
production of the sauce, however, still occurs right there on
the island, except instead of letting the pepper mash ferment
in jars and now ages in old bourbon barrels for
up to three years. Millions of bottles are sold each
year in grocery stores everywhere, and just about everyone would
recognize the diamond shaped logo on the front. That's right,
(04:32):
the spicy topping invented just after the Civil War, putting
a little family business on the map in the process.
Is now a worldwide hit known simply as Tabasco sauce.
(04:57):
When a trend gets big, people do what or they
can to capitalize on it. One televised singing competition gave
way to an entire genre. As people started taking more selfies,
companies came out with sticks so that they could hold
their phones in front for a better vacation picture. And
in the mid nineteenth century, the spiritualism movement gave rise
to amateur mediums in home seances and for one man,
(05:22):
a strange new way of communicating with the dead. Jonathan
was a farmer from Ohio. He lived with his wife
and nine kids, far from the hustle and bustle of
city life. Jonathan didn't think much of spiritualism. To him,
the people who practiced it were fakes and scammers, but
they were cropping up everywhere. To help put a stop
to it, Jonathan started traveling to seances with the purpose
(05:44):
of exposing mediums as frauds. There was just one problem.
He started second guessing himself. Odd sounds, floating tables, and
automatic writing could usually be explained away. However, during a
visit to Hideville, New York, Jonathan met a medium who
changed his life and his outlook. This person pointed right
(06:06):
at the skeptical farmer and told him that not only
was he physically linked to the other side, but he
might be the most powerful medium in the world. Well.
Needless to say, Jonathan left New York shocked and soon
returned to Ohio. When he wasn't tending to his farm,
he was researching spiritualism. This time, though he was doing
it from a place of genuine curiosity and obsession. He
(06:29):
spent the next several years learning everything he could and
honing his techniques. He would sit at a table with
paper and a pencil and lead his hand write whatever
it wanted to, a technique known as automatic writing. He
also began holding seances in his home along with the
rest of his family. Jonathan had come to believe that
not only had he become a powerful medium, the rest
(06:51):
of his clan were equally gifted as well. One day,
during a session with his eldest son, a message came
through from the spirit world. Jonathan was given instructions to
build a room in which he and his family could
contact the other side. The voice speaking through his son
gave exact measurements for the size of the room, which
(07:11):
was to be constructed within a log cabin on his property.
The room was to be twelve feet by fourteen feet,
accessible by a single door, and have three windows of
a specific size inside. He was told to hang bowls
from the ceiling and place a variety of musical instruments
like drums and violins around the space. The centerpiece would
(07:32):
be the Spirit Machine, intended to be a spiritual amplifier.
This device was meant to easily summon ghosts from their
world and allow them to remain in hours for longer
periods of time. Jonathan's oldest child drew the plans for
the machine as the spirit continued to speak through him.
The base would be a six legged table six ft
(07:52):
long two and a half feet tall. On top of
it would sit a wooden frame for the device itself.
A post in the center would support four curved pieces
holding up drums of different sizes, all fastened together with wire.
There was also copper wire wrapped in zinc that were
networked throughout the rest of the table, along with metal rods, bells,
and glass knobs. All of it had to be perfect
(08:16):
for the spirits, who depended on the machine to harness
electricity in order to create an electro magnetic field in
which they could manifest. When Jonathan finally finished the device,
his family started holding seances in the room with up
to twenty guests and attendance. Spirits would bang the drums
and blow the horns around them while making other objects levitate,
(08:38):
and yes, some spirits appeared in a floating, translucent form
right before their eyes. It looked as though the machine
was working as expected. Many in the family's position would
have charged a hefty sum to attend one of their seances,
which had grown quite popular, but they only asked for
voluntary donations. Unfortunately, as with most mediums of the day,
(09:00):
Jonathan's family was eventually accused of faking their sessions. Linus Everett,
an editor for a local newspaper, claimed to have seen
one of Jonathan's daughters crawling around in the dark to
carry out a ghostly effect. Once the story got out,
the family's fame turned sour. Jonathan stopped holding seances for
the public and locked up the cabin for good. The
(09:21):
mobs were so relentless that he his wife, and their
kids were all forced to leave Ohio behind, moving to Illinois.
A short while later. The family of Jonathan Cohon's and
their spirit machine were never seen or heard from again.
They had been just one of countless mediums to be
vilified in the press, but still, out of hundreds of
(09:41):
guests who attended their seances, only Linus Everett had ever
caught them faking an effect. Had everyone else been too
shocked to pay closer attention, or had the family been
the real deal after all? Without the cabin or the
spirit machine it contained, we may never know, but we
do have Nathan's plans for the device, making it possible
(10:02):
for someone else to build another. For those who want
to know the truth, though, that means there's hope. With
a little wire and a healthy dose of ingenuity, we
could always just give him a call and ask I
Hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities.
Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about
(10:25):
the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show
was created by me Aaron Manky in partnership with how
Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore,
which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and
you can learn all about it over at the World
of Lore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.
(10:49):
Ye
Welcome to Aaron Menkey's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
I Heart Radio and Grim and Mild. Our world is
full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book,
all of these amazing tales are right there on display,
just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet
(00:28):
of Curiosities. It's possible to live somewhere all your life
and not know everything about it. When we moved to
a new place, much of what we learned about it
is gleaned from exploration. There might be hidden treasure within
the walls of a home or buried in the backyard.
(00:51):
For the Avery family in eighteen sixty one, that treasure
wasn't just inside the home, The whole place was a
gold mine. Daniel Dudley Avery was a legal dollar from
Baton Rouge. In eighteen thirty one, he married into the
Marsh family, a wealthy clan of landowners with their own
island near the Gulf of Mexico. The Marshes turned the
island into a sugar plantation, as its soil and climate
(01:12):
provided ideal growing conditions. But years later, after Daniel had
become the sole owner of his in Law's empire, he
made some changes. First, he renamed the island Avery Island. Next,
he started digging around, eventually stumbling upon a salt mine
deep underground. Avery didn't know that the Native Americans who
had originally owned the island used to harvest the salted
(01:33):
trade with other tribes in neighboring states, but there it was.
With his newly discovered income stream resting just below his feet,
Avery started mining the island for its salt. At the time,
two major events in his life happened. His daughter Mary
Eliza Avery married a banker named Edmund Mcilhanny, and the
Civil War just began. The Confederate soldiers in the South
(01:57):
needed salt desperately. It wasn't just used to season food.
Salt was a powerful preservative, and the horses liked it too.
Avery got into the business of providing the Confederacy with
barrels of it until the Union eventually took control of
the island in an operation known as the Great Salt Expedition.
With the island compromised, Edmund fled with Mary to Texas,
(02:19):
where he worked in finance for the Confederacy. After the
South lost, Edmund was suddenly out of a job. He
moved with his family back to Avery Island, performing odd
jobs around the plantation. His primary task was maintaining the garden,
where Edmund took to growing all sorts of vegetables, including peppers.
A friend of his, Mansell White, had gifted the former
(02:42):
banker a bushel of peppers and a recipe to use them,
so Edmund planted the peppers for years. He tended to them,
building them up into a viable crop which he could
use in his recipe and then sell to folks on
the mainland. He would pulp the peppers into a mash,
then age them in jars over the ruse of a month,
after which he'd pour in some vinegar and let the
(03:03):
jars sit for another thirty days. Once the pepper mash
had finished fermenting, Edmund would pour the sauce into glass
cologne bottles and top them off with the cork stopper.
And then he would travel all throughout the Gulf coast
selling his product to anyone looking to add a little
flavor to their lives. Each bottle came with a little
sprinkler attachment that made it easier to add it to food,
(03:26):
and it seems the product was a hit. In his
first year, he sold over six fifty of them for
just a dollar apiece. Originally, many customers found the sauce
too spicy. They didn't understand that it wasn't like other sauces,
which could be applied to food with wild abandon. Their
delicate palets just hadn't adjusted to the spiciness. But once
(03:47):
they did, they couldn't get enough of it. The sauce
was so popular Edmund's company kept making it and continues
to do so today. Although some things have changed in
the old day is every pepper used in the sauce
was grown right there on Avery Island. Today, though the
peppers are harvested from all over South America and Africa,
(04:08):
where the climate is better suited to larger crops. The
production of the sauce, however, still occurs right there on
the island, except instead of letting the pepper mash ferment
in jars and now ages in old bourbon barrels for
up to three years. Millions of bottles are sold each
year in grocery stores everywhere, and just about everyone would
recognize the diamond shaped logo on the front. That's right,
(04:32):
the spicy topping invented just after the Civil War, putting
a little family business on the map in the process.
Is now a worldwide hit known simply as Tabasco sauce.
(04:57):
When a trend gets big, people do what or they
can to capitalize on it. One televised singing competition gave
way to an entire genre. As people started taking more selfies,
companies came out with sticks so that they could hold
their phones in front for a better vacation picture. And
in the mid nineteenth century, the spiritualism movement gave rise
to amateur mediums in home seances and for one man,
(05:22):
a strange new way of communicating with the dead. Jonathan
was a farmer from Ohio. He lived with his wife
and nine kids, far from the hustle and bustle of
city life. Jonathan didn't think much of spiritualism. To him,
the people who practiced it were fakes and scammers, but
they were cropping up everywhere. To help put a stop
to it, Jonathan started traveling to seances with the purpose
(05:44):
of exposing mediums as frauds. There was just one problem.
He started second guessing himself. Odd sounds, floating tables, and
automatic writing could usually be explained away. However, during a
visit to Hideville, New York, Jonathan met a medium who
changed his life and his outlook. This person pointed right
(06:06):
at the skeptical farmer and told him that not only
was he physically linked to the other side, but he
might be the most powerful medium in the world. Well.
Needless to say, Jonathan left New York shocked and soon
returned to Ohio. When he wasn't tending to his farm,
he was researching spiritualism. This time, though he was doing
it from a place of genuine curiosity and obsession. He
(06:29):
spent the next several years learning everything he could and
honing his techniques. He would sit at a table with
paper and a pencil and lead his hand write whatever
it wanted to, a technique known as automatic writing. He
also began holding seances in his home along with the
rest of his family. Jonathan had come to believe that
not only had he become a powerful medium, the rest
(06:51):
of his clan were equally gifted as well. One day,
during a session with his eldest son, a message came
through from the spirit world. Jonathan was given instructions to
build a room in which he and his family could
contact the other side. The voice speaking through his son
gave exact measurements for the size of the room, which
(07:11):
was to be constructed within a log cabin on his property.
The room was to be twelve feet by fourteen feet,
accessible by a single door, and have three windows of
a specific size inside. He was told to hang bowls
from the ceiling and place a variety of musical instruments
like drums and violins around the space. The centerpiece would
(07:32):
be the Spirit Machine, intended to be a spiritual amplifier.
This device was meant to easily summon ghosts from their
world and allow them to remain in hours for longer
periods of time. Jonathan's oldest child drew the plans for
the machine as the spirit continued to speak through him.
The base would be a six legged table six ft
(07:52):
long two and a half feet tall. On top of
it would sit a wooden frame for the device itself.
A post in the center would support four curved pieces
holding up drums of different sizes, all fastened together with wire.
There was also copper wire wrapped in zinc that were
networked throughout the rest of the table, along with metal rods, bells,
and glass knobs. All of it had to be perfect
(08:16):
for the spirits, who depended on the machine to harness
electricity in order to create an electro magnetic field in
which they could manifest. When Jonathan finally finished the device,
his family started holding seances in the room with up
to twenty guests and attendance. Spirits would bang the drums
and blow the horns around them while making other objects levitate,
(08:38):
and yes, some spirits appeared in a floating, translucent form
right before their eyes. It looked as though the machine
was working as expected. Many in the family's position would
have charged a hefty sum to attend one of their seances,
which had grown quite popular, but they only asked for
voluntary donations. Unfortunately, as with most mediums of the day,
(09:00):
Jonathan's family was eventually accused of faking their sessions. Linus Everett,
an editor for a local newspaper, claimed to have seen
one of Jonathan's daughters crawling around in the dark to
carry out a ghostly effect. Once the story got out,
the family's fame turned sour. Jonathan stopped holding seances for
the public and locked up the cabin for good. The
(09:21):
mobs were so relentless that he his wife, and their
kids were all forced to leave Ohio behind, moving to Illinois.
A short while later. The family of Jonathan Cohon's and
their spirit machine were never seen or heard from again.
They had been just one of countless mediums to be
vilified in the press, but still, out of hundreds of
(09:41):
guests who attended their seances, only Linus Everett had ever
caught them faking an effect. Had everyone else been too
shocked to pay closer attention, or had the family been
the real deal after all? Without the cabin or the
spirit machine it contained, we may never know, but we
do have Nathan's plans for the device, making it possible
(10:02):
for someone else to build another. For those who want
to know the truth, though, that means there's hope. With
a little wire and a healthy dose of ingenuity, we
could always just give him a call and ask I
Hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities.
Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about
(10:25):
the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show
was created by me Aaron Manky in partnership with how
Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore,
which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and
you can learn all about it over at the World
of Lore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.
(10:49):
Ye
Aaron Mahnke's Cabinet of Curiosities News
Host
Aaron Mahnke
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