Over a Barrel

Life rarely goes the way we plan it. Some people aim for fame and miss the target, while others attract it without trying. In either case, what happens next is worth re-telling.

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Episode Transcript

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. Fame is a strange creature.

(00:29):
It is both elusive and lucrative, and some people seek
it by any means necessary. Nowadays, there's no such thing
as bad publicity if it means keeping your name in
the news. But for Helen, fame came at a steep price.
She was born in in central Scotland, and from a
very young age, the people around Helen knew something was

(00:53):
off about her. She often scared classmates with grim warnings
of the future, and she convinced many of them that
she could talk to the dead. As she got older,
Helen's um gifts garnered her much acclaim and popularity among
her neighbors. She often held seances in her home, where
she would not only conjure spirits related to those in attendance,

(01:16):
but she would also produce ectoplasm from her mouth, as
though the dead were speaking through her. On rare occasions,
phantoms would appear behind her, including some Helen referred to
as her spirit guide to the other side. This spirit
guide was a child named Peggy, who would float above
the crowd, her spectral gown flowing overhead. Unfortunately, Helen and

(01:39):
the spirit world shared a common enemy, flash photography. During
one of her seances, while Helen was blindfolded, a photographer
in attendance snap some pictures of the so called phantoms
the host had managed to summon. They were moving around
behind her, wearing long white robes and stiff, cherubic faces.

(02:00):
It was hard to see in the dark, but once
illuminated by the photographer's flash, it became clear exactly what
the famous medium had actually managed to call forth masks
on coat hangers, wrapped in long white nightgowns. Oh and
that ectoplasm or spiritual energy that Helen would sometimes spit
up that was nothing more than cheesecloth and egg whites.

(02:24):
But Helen wasn't about to give up that easily. She
honestly believed she had a talent, and during November of
ninety she put that talent on full display. Helen and
her husband had recently moved to Portsmouth, the home of
the Royal Navy, and during one of her sessions, she
managed to conjure a sailor from the battleship h M.

(02:44):
S Barham. The sailor told the audience he had been
killed in battle and gone down with the ship, a
miraculous feat for anyone present, except for one problem. Nobody
knew about that accident. Given her history, most people didn't
put much faith in her powers. However, the Navy certainly did.
As it turned out a German sub really had sunk

(03:07):
the h M. S Barham months earlier and killed almost
nine hundred of her crew. News of the sinking had
been kept under wraps to fool the Nazis. The only
people who knew were the relatives of the deceased, so
there was no reason Helen would have known anything about
what had transpired. Word about Helen's prediction spread, and a
short while later, a Navy lieutenant attended a seance to

(03:30):
get a look for himself at the wondrous Mrs Duncan
and was shocked by what he found. She had manifested
an apparition of his late aunt, as well as his sister,
who had recently passed away. The lieutenant left angry and confused,
and contacted a police officer soon after, and that's because
he had no aunt nor a sister. The jig was up,

(03:51):
as they say, and Helen found herself in a lot
of trouble. You see, certain laws on the books hadn't
been updated with the times. Mediums were popular in nineteen
forties England, but many had been exposed as con artists
and were often charged under antiquated edicts such as the
Vagrancy Act of eighteen twenty four, as well as various
conspiracy and larceny laws. After all, they were swindling well

(04:15):
intentioned folks out of hard earned money. Helen's case, however,
proved difficult. She protested aggressively on behalf of her innocence.
She didn't see herself as a liar or a cheat.
In her mind, she was the real deal, providing a
much needed service and form of relief to mourning loved ones.
So prosecutors found another way to get her. They convicted

(04:39):
her under the Witchcraft Act of seventeen thirty five, and
that earned her a jail sentence of nine months. Upon
her release, she promised to not conduct another seance as
long as she lived. She held on to that promise
for fifteen years until nineteen fifty six, when she was
arrested again after violating the Fraudulent Media Him's Act of

(05:00):
nineteen fifty one, the act that had replaced the Witchcraft Act.
Perhaps Helen Duncan was a fraud, or maybe she was
the real deal. No one has been able to prove
how she obtained her knowledge of the h. M. S.
Bar Um, but one thing is for sure. According to
English history, she was the last witch whoever have her

(05:24):
day in court. Like most of us, Annie had big
plans for her life. But plans don't always work out,
do they? An upstate New York in the eighteen fifties,

(05:46):
and thee's prospects were slim. She came from a big
family with big needs, and after her father's death in
eighteen fifty, Annie struck out on her own. She sought
an education to become a school teacher. It was during
this time when she met David. The two fell in
love and eventually married, But like I said before, plans
don't always work out. The couple had a child who

(06:09):
didn't survive past infancy. David died a short time later,
and poor Annie spent the next several decades floating from
one odd job to the next. She opened her own
dance studio in Michigan, then left to teach music up north,
eventually making her way to San Antonio, Texas, and Mexico
City before finally settling back in Michigan. Times were changing,

(06:32):
America had entered the twentieth century, and Annie was getting older.
She had no long term financial solution to fall back on,
and retirement was out of the question. Most women at
the time would have looked for simple ways of keeping
their situation, but not Annie. She needed to make a
splash to stay afloat. Literally. Her idea was simple. On

(06:54):
October nineteen o one, her sixty third birthday. In fact,
she would pack herself into an oak pickle barrel and
launched herself over Niagara Falls. Like I said before, simple
right now. Understandably, she had trouble finding people to help her.
Few wanted to be responsible for a woman killing herself

(07:16):
in the most ostentatious way possible. Yet she continued with
her plan and even did a test run a few
days before the main event. Not with herself, mind, you know,
she used a cat, and don't worry, the cats survived,
and forty eight hours after it emerged from the barrel,
Annie stepped inside her own. It was lined with a
mattress to absorb some of the impact, and a rescue

(07:38):
team was established at the base of the falls to
retrieve her. Once the barrel reached the bottom. She planned
for everything, it seems. Annie and the barrel rode out
toward Goat Island, situated at the top of the falls,
along with some of her friends. She tossed the barrel
overboard and climbed inside while her associates screwed the lid
down tight. Then they used a by bicicle pump to

(08:00):
compress the air inside the barrel, which they then sealed
off with a cork. And that was it. The time
had come for Annie to make good on her promise
and hopefully make a little money at the same time.
The current carried the barrel down the river and over
the falls, where it plummeted to the waters below. The

(08:21):
team of rescuers found her, and, fearing the worst, pride
the barrel open. They peered inside. There was Annie, her
head smeared with blood, a little worse for wear, but
she was still alive. She'd done it. Annie Edson Taylor
had become the first woman to go over Niagara Falls
in a barrel and live to tell the tale, which

(08:44):
she did often, of course. Not long after her stunt,
Annie went on a brief speaking to her When asked
whether she'd ever try it again, she was quoted as saying,
I would sooner walk up to the mouth of a
cannon knowing it was going to blow me to pieces
than another trip over the falls. Still, her speaking engagements
didn't garner her the financial security that she hoped for.

(09:07):
She took the posing for pictures with tourists and planned
on doing another plunge several years later, but nothing ever
came of it. She spent her final years once again
bouncing around from job to job, at one time finding
herself conducting seances as a medium, before passing away in
in relative obscurity. Since her stint, Annie's life and experiences

(09:31):
have inspired numerous stories, television specials, and even a stage musical. However,
it has inspired rumors as well. One such rumor involved
a stowaway inside her barrel. According to reports at the time,
the cat that went over the falls days before Annie
stunt hadn't been the only feeline involved. Apparently, a black

(09:53):
cat had been placed beside Annie before she was sealed
inside her barrel. And when that barrel was recovered and opened,
they say the cat emerged unharmed, except for one small change.
All it's black fur it turned white. I hope you've

(10:14):
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.
I make another award winning show called Lore, which is
a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can

(10:36):
learn all about it over at the World of Lore
dot com. And until next time, stay curious.