Waking Up

The lives we live can often leave a mark on the world. Sometimes that's due to our accomplishments, and sometimes it's all about what we've forgotten.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcomed. Aaron Manky's Cabinet of Curiosity is a production of
iHeart 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

(00:27):
of Curiosities. The games we enjoy today have evolved over time.
Baseball in basketball, for example, look a lot different today
than they did fifty years ago, and soccer or football
for listeners outside of the United States, might have undergone

(00:49):
the most change. It used to be a lot closer
to rugby. But one man sought to change all of
that when he wasn't walking along the bottom of the
New York Bay. His name was Arthur Pember. Born in Brixton, England,
in eighteen thirty five, Pember came from a wealthy family,
his father a successful stockbroker. He was homeschooled and didn't
go to college, choosing instead to work alongside his father

(01:12):
in London as a stockbroker as well. Pember eventually married
Elizabeth Houghton in eighteen sixty, but after she died from
complications arising from a miscarriage. He remarried in eighteen sixty
two to Alice Mary Grieve, but eighteen sixty two also
marked the start of a blooming passion for Pember the
No Names or n N football club. He could often

(01:35):
be found clad in a knitted jersey and cap, scrambling
across a field in northwest London as he tried to
put a ball between a pair of goal posts stuck
in the dirt. He became team captain the following year
and represented the club at a meeting of all the
other clubs in the area in October of eighteen sixty three.
Football was something of a wild West back then, before

(01:57):
things were standardized and coded. Every club town seemed to
have its own set of rules. For example, Cambridge University
used only their feet, but players at the Rugby Public
School use their hands to carry the ball. Rugby Public
School also happened to be where the sport of rugby originated.
With everyone else playing by different rules and regulations, figuring

(02:18):
out who scored and who won became something of a headache.
Pember chaired the first football club meeting and explained to
the group how the sport they loved needed a universal
rule book. Not only would it make it easier for
everyone to play, but it would also expand its appeal
outside of their organization. They all agreed, and by the
end of the meeting two decisions had been made. First,

(02:40):
the captains of eleven clubs came together to form an
official governing body known as the Football Association, and secondly,
they elected Arthur Pember as its president. But not everyone
was in agreement. England's public schools already played by their
own rules and had no interest in joining the Association
unless they had a prominent role in either creating the

(03:01):
new guidelines or running them entirely. Public schools in the
UK weren't like the public schools in America. They were
institutions meant for the elites of high society. Pember had
never attended a public school, and he had no interest
in letting them steamroll his efforts of football standardization. He
got to work laying down the law. Players could no

(03:22):
longer run while holding the ball, nor could they kick
or trip someone below the knee, otherwise known as hacking.
It took five meetings and a lot of heartache, but
in the end Pember got his rule book. The laws
of the game were sold for a shilling apiece published
as an easy to carry booklets. The association kicked off
part in the pun the adoption of its new rules

(03:45):
on January ninth of eighteen sixty four with a game
between two teams, one captain by Pember himself. The president
side one two to zero, kicking off Pember's multi year
tenure as a prominent football player and high ranking member
of these asociation. Roughly four years later, Pember and his
family moved across the Pond to America, settling in New

(04:06):
York City on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Aside from football,
there was another activity he loved, mountaineering. Back in eighteen
sixty three, Pember had actually summitted Mount Blanc in the
Alps and now lectured in New York. On his climbing experiences,
he was almost never satisfied and sought new ways to
push himself. But more importantly, Pember seemed to have a

(04:27):
problem with bullies, as he had handled back home by
refusing to let one football club kick opposing players during games,
as I said, a practice known as hacking. His stance
caused that club to leave the association entirely. He took
a job for the New York Tribune, investigating corruption among
the police departments in prisons. He also reported for The

(04:48):
New York Times on how the poor lived by disguising
himself as a beggar and embedding himself among them. But
one story still nagged at him. It had captivated him
soon after his arrival in New York when he learned
about the existence of the Fiji Mermaid, an exhibit that
had been part of P. T. Barnum's American Museum. The
mermaid was a three ft long sea creature that had

(05:10):
been allegedly purchased from Japanese sailors in eighteen twenty two.
It had a fish like tail, a shriveled body, and
a mouth full of teeth. It had been a hoax,
obviously most likely made of paper mache, but Pember didn't care.
Even though he knew better. He believed traveling to the
bottom of New York Bay made for a must read story.

(05:31):
Papers were already reporting on the potential mermaid sighting by
a mother who had allegedly witnessed one off the coast
of Cape Cod in eighteen seventy two. Pember donned a
diving suit and stepped off a boat into the murky
depths of New York Bay. His boots weighed sixteen pounds
and carried him to the bottom, helped by a hundred
pound weight that had been fastened to his chest. He

(05:53):
certainly got an Eiffel of absolutely nothing. The bay was
too polluted to see anything at all. He wrote his
story saying, I can vouch for the fact that there
are no mermaids in New York Bay, at least not
in that part of which I explored. Pember, after suffering
the losses of several of his children and his wife Alice,
eventually left New York for North Dakota, where he wrote

(06:15):
a book about his time as a journalist back east. Unfortunately,
he never finished it. He died at the age of
fifty eight. Though his life ended abruptly, he left behind
a sizeable legacy, and not just as a journalist. One
week before he died, Pember read in The Times that
local football clubs were playing the game according to the

(06:36):
rules laid down by the Football Association in England. His rules.
He might not have found mermaids in New York Bay,
but Arthur Pember had changed the face of one of
the world's most popular sports during his short time on
this earth. New Jersey is known for a lot of

(07:06):
weird things. Heck, there's even a whole magazine devoted to it,
from haunted roads, to abandoned mental facilities to strange creatures
lurking within its woods. New Jersey isn't just about boardwalk
pizza and turnpike exits, but one weird story that doesn't
often get told revolves around a man named Charles Bruin.
Bruin was a Civil War veteran who had moved to Burlington,

(07:27):
New Jersey after the war to become a tailor. He
led a quiet life, getting along with his neighbors and
attending church every Sunday. However, on November nine of nineteen
o three, the unexplainable happened. Charles Bruin disappeared. No one
knew what had happened to him. His neighbors hadn't seen him.
The police and friends searched high and low, even across

(07:48):
state lines, for the valued member of their community, to
no avail. All that remained was a man's hat with
a piece of paper bearing his name. The items that
have been found on a ferry, the crew of which
hadn't remembered seeing him either. Four years went by. A
man by the name of Alfred Woolman had moved from Burlington,
New Jersey, to Plainfield, Vermont, and taken a job as

(08:11):
a trolley conductor. He was watching his passengers boarding the
trolley when a man stepped on for a ride. Woolman
recognized him immediately. After all, he had been a mainstay
of Burlington for so long and had been missing for
the past four years. It was Charles Bruin. His friends
and neighbors were surely going to be thrilled that he
was still alive. Woolman walked over and greeted the man,

(08:34):
asking him what had happened, why he had left. The
passenger looked up as though Woolman was a stranger. He
told him he must have the wrong person. He said
his name was Frank Johnson from New York and he
didn't know this Bruin the conductor was talking about. Johnson
exited the trolley soon after leaving. Woolman stupefied, but the
conductor refused to let it go. He started asking around

(08:56):
town if anyone knew this man, Frank Johnson. As it's
turned out they did. Johnson had arrived in Vermont three
years prior, and just like Bruin, he kept mostly to himself.
He was simply a god fearing man who attended church
on Sundays. But that wasn't enough for Woolman. He had
to know for sure. He was like a dog with
a bone, and he knew he needed help to bring

(09:18):
closure to the case. He reached out to Bruin's brother,
who came to Burlington and greeted the man who looked
exactly like his sibling. Johnson, however, was upset. He had
already told Woolman that he was not Charles Bruin. He
had no idea who these people were, including the man
claiming to be his brother, So Johnson explained to them
the details of his old life in New York. He

(09:39):
had had a daughter who still lived there. Her name
was Anne, and he had recently purchased a life insurance
policy for her. Frank Johnson's back story was full of
little details, and for a moment it sounded like Woolman
and the brother had gotten mixed up in the bizarre
case of mistaken identity. They all eventually departed and the
story wound up in a local newspaper. Maybe it was

(09:59):
a slow news day, A friend of Johnson's name, Dr
Buchanan read the story about Woolman, the brother and Charles
Bruin from Burlington, New Jersey. As it so happened, Buchanan's
father had been a chaplain back in Burlington's and asked
him if he had ever known Charles Bruin. Then, around
June thirty, Buchanan was awoken in the middle of the
night by a phone call. It was Johnson's landlady. Her

(10:22):
tenant had apparently woken up without any knowledge of where
he was or how he had gotten there, and Johnson
told her that his name was Charles Bruin. Buchanan and
his father hurried to the home where Johnson knee Bruin
was staying and found him pale faced and in a daze.
He said he was Charles Bruin from Burlington, New Jersey.
He recognized Dr Buchanan's father, but the last four years

(10:45):
were a blank. He didn't remember Anne or New York
or any of what he had told Woolman and his
brother a short time earlier. He did, however, remember everything
that had happened before he became Frank Johnson, such as
his life in New Jersey and his time in the
Civil War, but something else had cropped up doing Bruin's
life as Frank Johnson his prophetic dreams. One dream had

(11:08):
involved a fire in a shop in which a woman
named Miss Brown would have died, but Johnson had been
there to save her. The following day, fire broke out
at the same establishment, just as he predicted, and he
stepped in to save Miss Brown's life for real. Another
dream occurred after an incident in which he had repaired
a fur coat and then sent it back to its owner.

(11:28):
The owner returned it, saying that the lining was shredded
by the time it had reached him. That night, Johnson
dreamt that he had taken the coat back to New York,
where he met a small man who told him the
skins that he had used for the lining were the
wrong type. The next day, Johnson packed up the coats,
took it to New York, and met the man that
he had seen in his dream. The rest of the
events transpired exactly as he predicted. No one knew exactly

(11:53):
what had caused Charles Bruin to abandon his old life
and start a new one as Frank Johnson, nor could
they explain in his ability to predict the future through
his dreams, although his story was reported on in several
newspapers and the Journal of American Society for Psychical Research.
As for Bruin, he went back to New Jersey where
he was reunited with his family. One week later, however,

(12:15):
he moved back to Vermont where he got his old
job back, the one that he had when he was
Frank Johnson. Because apparently, some habits, even the ones we
don't remember, and definitely be hard to break. I hope
you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities.

(12:37):
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. 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

(12:58):
of Lore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.