October 24, 2019 • 11 mins
It's time to enjoy some tall tales, both of which are perfect for inclusion in the Cabinet of Curiosities.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
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 of Curiosities. The Greek playwright Aristophanes
(00:29):
had been drinking with philosopher Plato at a banquet when
he delivered a speech originally meant to be a kind
of satire on the creation myths of the time. Aristophanes
proposed that there was a reason for love's existence in
the world. He told Plato and the gathering crowd that
men and women had originally started out as one being,
two heads, four arms, and four legs, performing cart wheels
(00:52):
to get from place to place. And these beings were
fast and strong, too strong for the gods, in fact,
who didn't want to be. Usurped as the most powerful
entities in the universe. To remind them of their place,
Zeus cleaved each pair in half. Since then, humans have
walked this earth longing for their missing halves, and are
(01:12):
drawn together by love. While he may have meant the
story to be an absurd, comedic exercise, there's something beautiful
about the sentiment two people searching their whole lives for
that perfect soul mate to make them whole again. Perhaps
Martin van Buren Bates and his wife Anna haning Swan
(01:33):
were two halves of a whole. Born in Nova Scotia
in eighteen forty six, Anna grew up among eleven other
brothers and sisters, while Martin was raised down in Kentucky.
He worked as a school teacher before the Civil War began.
When it did, he signed up to fight in eighteen
sixty one, joining the fifth Kentucky Infantry as a private
in the Confederate Army. Martin turned out to be a
(01:55):
fierce fighter, and he often intimidated the Union soldiers on
the other side. It didn't take long for him to
rise up through the ranks to become captain. After the war,
Martin found himself a few job prospects back home, but
traveling circus offered him the chance to earn a living
and see more of what North America had to offer.
(02:17):
The tour took him all over, including across the border
into Canada. It was at a stop in Halifax where
he met Anna, who was immediately taken with Martin. She
was brilliant, a prodigy piano player, as well as a
talented singer and actor who had once portrayed Lady Macbeth.
She too joined the circus and struck up a relationship
(02:37):
with Martin. Shortly after that, they were married. Despite their
nomadic lifestyle, Anna and Martin wanted a place for themselves
to settle down, a home to go to when they
weren't on tour or when they needed arrest. The newly
Woods had a house built on one thirty acres of
farmland in Ohio that they purchased with their circus earnings.
(02:58):
Its ceilings were fourteen feet high, the doors were built
to be eight feet tall and wider than usual, and
they had all their furniture custom made too, because it
had to be in order to accommodate their imposing frames.
Martin Bates, you see, was seven and a half feet tall,
while his wife Anna stood an impressive seven feet eleven inches.
(03:21):
Martin had grown quite tall when he was six years old.
By the time he was twelve, he was over six
feet and weighed more than two hundred pounds. Anna had
begun growing very early on in her life as well.
At four years old, she was already over four ft tall.
Two years later, she'd grown another foot and a half,
and they'd both been hired by the circus as an attraction,
(03:42):
and they were successful, too, drawing enormous crowds to gawk
at their severe statures. She and Martin had two children together.
The first, a girl, born in May of eighteen seventy two,
died during birth. That baby had weighed over eighteen pounds.
The second child, a boy this time, was born seven
(04:02):
years later. He measured almost thirty inches long and weighed
in at twenty three pounds nine ounces. Sadly, he lived
only eleven hours before passing away, but in his short life,
the child had earned the Guinness World Record for largest
newborn in history. Anna toured with the circus for a
few more years alongside her husband before settling down on
(04:24):
the farm. It's not clear if Anna had some kind
of underlying condition, or if perhaps the loss of children
had done untold damage to her heart, but she died
in her sleep in the summer of eighteen eight one
day before her forty second birthday. Her husband had a
statue of her installed at her grave site before selling
(04:44):
their house and moving into town. He wouldn't find love
again for another ten years, when he would remarry this
time to an average sized woman. Martin died in nineteen
nineteen at the age of eighty one. He never had
any children, but he'd lived a long, fulfilling life, much
of it spent with his perfect mate Anna. When they
(05:06):
were together, they were two halves reunited to become whole,
showing the world that love truly does come in all
shapes and sizes. People can be pretty skeptical when it
(05:29):
comes to tales of the supernatural. Our first inclination is disbelief,
to chalk up the stories to wild imagination or a
cry for attention. Ghosts aren't real. We say that clunking
sound in the middle of the night, it's just the
pipes or the creaking floor, or maybe the house is
just settling. But what happens when a ghost story is
(05:50):
more than just a story. What happens when the police
and the media both believe that what is terrorizing one
family is more than just a frightening tail because they've
seen or at least heard it for themselves. The Palathon
family lived on the second floor of an apartment in Spain.
On September ninety four, they began hearing bizarre sounds coming
(06:15):
from their kitchen actually, let me clarify that from within
the stove in their kitchen, a voice spoke from within it,
and there was laughter too, and sometimes screaming coming from
everywhere and nowhere at once. At first, it was believed
by both the family and the neighbors that the voice
was coming from someone else on the block. The chimney
(06:36):
where the stove smoke was let out connected to other homes.
It was entirely possible that a man's voice was carrying
from another unit through the pipes and into the stove
in the Palothon family. But if that were true, then
the neighbors would also have been experiencing the same thing,
and yet only they had a voice coming out of
their stove. Those who stopped by to listen verified their claims.
(06:58):
They too heard someone talking or laughing or yelling from
inside the stove. And that's when the rumors started to spread.
The Palothons were haunted. The rumors quickly turned into belief
in a terrifying supernatural entity known as a duende. Duende
is a Spanish term for a possessor of a house.
(07:20):
In eighteenth century paintings, the creature is depicted as a
goblin or imp with sharp teeth and long, claw like fingers.
As the story spread, crowds from within the town and
beyond gathered outside to listen in and try to hear
the Duende speaking. All the while, the Palathon family did
their best to carry on with normal life, while the
(07:40):
creature made sure that could never happen. It would ask
questions and even answered them. When asked, it would call
out the name of the Palathons made and then cackle
it's howling laughter ringing out from deep within the stove. Eventually,
the disruptions became too great, and the family reached out
to the authorities for help and flowing out the mischievous
(08:01):
little demon. The police chief himself attended to the matter,
arriving at their doorstep in mid November of ninety four.
Upon entering the home, he immediately started questioning the voice.
Where are you? He asked, why are you doing this?
The Duende answered no. The chief asked more questions, wondering
(08:23):
if the person on the other end needed a job
or money. Again, it's simply replied no. Then he asked
one final question, then, who are you? What is it
that you want? The voice responded from the stove, saying nothing.
I am not a man. The local police helped the
(08:45):
family find other living arrangements while they investigated the cause
of the disturbance, but tales of a demonic voice forcing
a family out of their home had rattled the community.
A panic spread throughout the town, and the story eventually
wound its way to the United Kingdom, where the London
Times started reporting on it. A Spanish radio station even
asked to interview the voice for one of its talk shows.
(09:09):
The investigation carried on for weeks, with the police at
a loss as to the reason for the voices persistence.
Architects and contractors were asked to inspect a home but
found nothing. The police, fed up with getting nowhere in
their hunt, brought in every organization in person they could
think of. They asked the army to cut off the
Holmes access to electricity and phones. Officers guarded all entrances
(09:33):
around the clock. Priests spiritually sanitized the apartment with holy
water and prayers, and it seemed that the duende, or
the person behind it, had finally been forced out. The
voice had gun silence. The Palathons soon moved back in
and during their first night there nothing happened. They all
(09:53):
had a RESTful night's sleep, something they hadn't experienced in
almost two months. The following more earning, though, a voice
bellowed from the chimney cowards. It called them cowards. Here
I am for the Palaton family. That was the last straw.
They packed up and left their apartment forever. That day,
(10:14):
the police chief, under orders from the governor, brought the
family in for questioning. He even had them speak with
a psychiatrist to see if perhaps the situation had all
just been in their heads. It hadn't, but it also
hadn't been a real duende. The voice, as declared by
the governor later, had been the work of their maid.
She hadn't done it to deceive them or to run
(10:36):
them out of their home, though it seems that she
suffered from something called unconscious ventriloquism. She'd been able to
throw her voice and didn't even know it. The voice
was never heard from again after the governor's announcement. Forty
years later, the block was demolished and a new structure
was built in its place, and this new building's name
(10:57):
at the Fouende the Goblin Building. I hope you've enjoyed
today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for
free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show
by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created
by me Aaron Manky in partnership with how Stuff Works.
(11:21):
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. Ye
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 of Curiosities. The Greek playwright Aristophanes
(00:29):
had been drinking with philosopher Plato at a banquet when
he delivered a speech originally meant to be a kind
of satire on the creation myths of the time. Aristophanes
proposed that there was a reason for love's existence in
the world. He told Plato and the gathering crowd that
men and women had originally started out as one being,
two heads, four arms, and four legs, performing cart wheels
(00:52):
to get from place to place. And these beings were
fast and strong, too strong for the gods, in fact,
who didn't want to be. Usurped as the most powerful
entities in the universe. To remind them of their place,
Zeus cleaved each pair in half. Since then, humans have
walked this earth longing for their missing halves, and are
(01:12):
drawn together by love. While he may have meant the
story to be an absurd, comedic exercise, there's something beautiful
about the sentiment two people searching their whole lives for
that perfect soul mate to make them whole again. Perhaps
Martin van Buren Bates and his wife Anna haning Swan
(01:33):
were two halves of a whole. Born in Nova Scotia
in eighteen forty six, Anna grew up among eleven other
brothers and sisters, while Martin was raised down in Kentucky.
He worked as a school teacher before the Civil War began.
When it did, he signed up to fight in eighteen
sixty one, joining the fifth Kentucky Infantry as a private
in the Confederate Army. Martin turned out to be a
(01:55):
fierce fighter, and he often intimidated the Union soldiers on
the other side. It didn't take long for him to
rise up through the ranks to become captain. After the war,
Martin found himself a few job prospects back home, but
traveling circus offered him the chance to earn a living
and see more of what North America had to offer.
(02:17):
The tour took him all over, including across the border
into Canada. It was at a stop in Halifax where
he met Anna, who was immediately taken with Martin. She
was brilliant, a prodigy piano player, as well as a
talented singer and actor who had once portrayed Lady Macbeth.
She too joined the circus and struck up a relationship
(02:37):
with Martin. Shortly after that, they were married. Despite their
nomadic lifestyle, Anna and Martin wanted a place for themselves
to settle down, a home to go to when they
weren't on tour or when they needed arrest. The newly
Woods had a house built on one thirty acres of
farmland in Ohio that they purchased with their circus earnings.
(02:58):
Its ceilings were fourteen feet high, the doors were built
to be eight feet tall and wider than usual, and
they had all their furniture custom made too, because it
had to be in order to accommodate their imposing frames.
Martin Bates, you see, was seven and a half feet tall,
while his wife Anna stood an impressive seven feet eleven inches.
(03:21):
Martin had grown quite tall when he was six years old.
By the time he was twelve, he was over six
feet and weighed more than two hundred pounds. Anna had
begun growing very early on in her life as well.
At four years old, she was already over four ft tall.
Two years later, she'd grown another foot and a half,
and they'd both been hired by the circus as an attraction,
(03:42):
and they were successful, too, drawing enormous crowds to gawk
at their severe statures. She and Martin had two children together.
The first, a girl, born in May of eighteen seventy two,
died during birth. That baby had weighed over eighteen pounds.
The second child, a boy this time, was born seven
(04:02):
years later. He measured almost thirty inches long and weighed
in at twenty three pounds nine ounces. Sadly, he lived
only eleven hours before passing away, but in his short life,
the child had earned the Guinness World Record for largest
newborn in history. Anna toured with the circus for a
few more years alongside her husband before settling down on
(04:24):
the farm. It's not clear if Anna had some kind
of underlying condition, or if perhaps the loss of children
had done untold damage to her heart, but she died
in her sleep in the summer of eighteen eight one
day before her forty second birthday. Her husband had a
statue of her installed at her grave site before selling
(04:44):
their house and moving into town. He wouldn't find love
again for another ten years, when he would remarry this
time to an average sized woman. Martin died in nineteen
nineteen at the age of eighty one. He never had
any children, but he'd lived a long, fulfilling life, much
of it spent with his perfect mate Anna. When they
(05:06):
were together, they were two halves reunited to become whole,
showing the world that love truly does come in all
shapes and sizes. People can be pretty skeptical when it
(05:29):
comes to tales of the supernatural. Our first inclination is disbelief,
to chalk up the stories to wild imagination or a
cry for attention. Ghosts aren't real. We say that clunking
sound in the middle of the night, it's just the
pipes or the creaking floor, or maybe the house is
just settling. But what happens when a ghost story is
(05:50):
more than just a story. What happens when the police
and the media both believe that what is terrorizing one
family is more than just a frightening tail because they've
seen or at least heard it for themselves. The Palathon
family lived on the second floor of an apartment in Spain.
On September ninety four, they began hearing bizarre sounds coming
(06:15):
from their kitchen actually, let me clarify that from within
the stove in their kitchen, a voice spoke from within it,
and there was laughter too, and sometimes screaming coming from
everywhere and nowhere at once. At first, it was believed
by both the family and the neighbors that the voice
was coming from someone else on the block. The chimney
(06:36):
where the stove smoke was let out connected to other homes.
It was entirely possible that a man's voice was carrying
from another unit through the pipes and into the stove
in the Palothon family. But if that were true, then
the neighbors would also have been experiencing the same thing,
and yet only they had a voice coming out of
their stove. Those who stopped by to listen verified their claims.
(06:58):
They too heard someone talking or laughing or yelling from
inside the stove. And that's when the rumors started to spread.
The Palothons were haunted. The rumors quickly turned into belief
in a terrifying supernatural entity known as a duende. Duende
is a Spanish term for a possessor of a house.
(07:20):
In eighteenth century paintings, the creature is depicted as a
goblin or imp with sharp teeth and long, claw like fingers.
As the story spread, crowds from within the town and
beyond gathered outside to listen in and try to hear
the Duende speaking. All the while, the Palathon family did
their best to carry on with normal life, while the
(07:40):
creature made sure that could never happen. It would ask
questions and even answered them. When asked, it would call
out the name of the Palathons made and then cackle
it's howling laughter ringing out from deep within the stove. Eventually,
the disruptions became too great, and the family reached out
to the authorities for help and flowing out the mischievous
(08:01):
little demon. The police chief himself attended to the matter,
arriving at their doorstep in mid November of ninety four.
Upon entering the home, he immediately started questioning the voice.
Where are you? He asked, why are you doing this?
The Duende answered no. The chief asked more questions, wondering
(08:23):
if the person on the other end needed a job
or money. Again, it's simply replied no. Then he asked
one final question, then, who are you? What is it
that you want? The voice responded from the stove, saying nothing.
I am not a man. The local police helped the
(08:45):
family find other living arrangements while they investigated the cause
of the disturbance, but tales of a demonic voice forcing
a family out of their home had rattled the community.
A panic spread throughout the town, and the story eventually
wound its way to the United Kingdom, where the London
Times started reporting on it. A Spanish radio station even
asked to interview the voice for one of its talk shows.
(09:09):
The investigation carried on for weeks, with the police at
a loss as to the reason for the voices persistence.
Architects and contractors were asked to inspect a home but
found nothing. The police, fed up with getting nowhere in
their hunt, brought in every organization in person they could
think of. They asked the army to cut off the
Holmes access to electricity and phones. Officers guarded all entrances
(09:33):
around the clock. Priests spiritually sanitized the apartment with holy
water and prayers, and it seemed that the duende, or
the person behind it, had finally been forced out. The
voice had gun silence. The Palathons soon moved back in
and during their first night there nothing happened. They all
(09:53):
had a RESTful night's sleep, something they hadn't experienced in
almost two months. The following more earning, though, a voice
bellowed from the chimney cowards. It called them cowards. Here
I am for the Palaton family. That was the last straw.
They packed up and left their apartment forever. That day,
(10:14):
the police chief, under orders from the governor, brought the
family in for questioning. He even had them speak with
a psychiatrist to see if perhaps the situation had all
just been in their heads. It hadn't, but it also
hadn't been a real duende. The voice, as declared by
the governor later, had been the work of their maid.
She hadn't done it to deceive them or to run
(10:36):
them out of their home, though it seems that she
suffered from something called unconscious ventriloquism. She'd been able to
throw her voice and didn't even know it. The voice
was never heard from again after the governor's announcement. Forty
years later, the block was demolished and a new structure
was built in its place, and this new building's name
(10:57):
at the Fouende the Goblin Building. I hope you've enjoyed
today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for
free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show
by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created
by me Aaron Manky in partnership with how Stuff Works.
(11:21):
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. Ye
Aaron Mahnke's Cabinet of Curiosities News
Host
Aaron Mahnke
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