Lay an Egg

The world around us is filled with wonderful treasures, and none are more powerful than the stories we tell. Here are two tales worthy of display in the Cabinet of Curiosities.

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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 right
there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome
to the Cabinet of curiosities. Visits from strangers aren't always

(00:29):
a good thing, Whether it's members of the local high
school football team knocking on your door in the middle
of a Sunday nap, or the strangers with candy that
we warn all of our children about. Unannounced guests can
often signal a frustrating or frightening situation. Every now and then, however,
expectations are broken, and those chance encounters leave us feeling

(00:50):
more human and connected than we ever could on our own.
Helping a stranger out with a flat tire, for example,
more stopping to have a conversation and a cup of
coffee with some one less fortunate. But every now and then,
those strange encounters are something more. Sometimes they're unexplainable. In
April of sixteen seventy one, a Swedish farmer named Peter

(01:12):
rom gave sworn testimony about just such an encounter, one
that had happened to him and his wife back in
sixteen sixty. According to the man. He and his wife
lived on a farm just outside of Ragunda at the time,
where they worked hard and enjoyed the peace and solitude
that came from life outside the larger community. One evening, though,

(01:32):
Peter and his wife retired to the little cottage after
a long day of work on their farm and fell
into conversation in front of the fire. As those orange
flames danced in front of them and the quiet of
the night surrounded them, an unexpected knock sounded at the door.
When Peter opened the door, he found a small figure
standing before him. Firelight from inside the house spilled on

(01:54):
the visitor, making him visible against the black night behind him.
The visitor was a small man, shorter than a grown adult,
yet had the features of a mature, older man. But
that wasn't the only thing unexpected about his appearance. No,
this man was also described as having a dark complexion,
something that must have stood out in the pale north

(02:14):
of Sweden. Even the visitor's clothing was odd, seeming to
be made of old gray fabric that caught the light
in another worldly way. And when the door opened, this
visitor looked up at Peter and spoke, I require your help.
The smaller man told Peter, my wife is with child
and has begun her labor, and she could use very

(02:35):
much the assistance of someone more experienced than me, And then,
glancing past Peter's larger form, the small man made eye
contact with Peter's wife, who was still seated beside the fire,
watching their conversation intently. Do you think the visitor asked,
your wife would be willing to come with me and
help my own wife deliver our child. Peter was speechless.

(02:59):
This mysterious man, this visitor from some strange place, who
had never met them before, had arrived to ask for help,
and not just help, but for Peter's own wife to
venture off without him, out into the darkness of the night,
with no guarantee for her safety or return, and yet
he felt compelled to help. According to Peter's testimony, he

(03:21):
claims that he had returned to his wife's side and
discussed the matter with her. In the end, she agreed
that she should help, but before she left the house,
Peter read some prayers over her to bless her, and
then sent her on her way. I can't imagine what
that night was like for Peter. How long he sat
alone beside the fire, I do not know. His wife
had taken a stack of old linens with her, and

(03:43):
most likely a stash of herbs and medicinal aids. But
the minutes slowly became ours, and those hours probably felt
like an eternity. But by ten o'clock that night, his
wife had returned. According to her, the strange small man
had led her out the gate of their farm earlier
that night. As he did, Peter's wife claims that she
felt as if she had been caught up in the wind,

(04:05):
and before she knew it, she was standing inside a small,
dark chamber, a chamber, she said, that contained a bed
and a pregnant woman in great pain. Peter's wife said
that she did exactly as she was asked. She helped
the man's wife through her labor, and in the end,
the happy couple was able to hold their new child.
The man offered her food, but she declined, telling him

(04:27):
that she wished to return to her home and her husband.
So the small man caught her up in another mysterious wind,
and she once again found herself standing at the gate
of their farm. The next day, Peter and his wife
awoke and fell into their normal routine managing the farm
and all that came with it. But while cleaning one
of the rooms, his wife came upon the oddest thing.

(04:49):
They're sitting on a shelf in plain sight, a shelf
that she looked at every single day. It was a
pile of shimmering objects. But when she gathered them up,
she caught her breath. It was silver, dozens of small
pieces of beautiful, valuable silver, payment she assumed for the
help she's so kindly offered to a stranger. Sometimes it

(05:12):
seems it does pay to be kind. The English language
is full of a lot of unusual idioms phrases that

(05:32):
sound like one thing but have an entirely different meaning.
Some of them come and go with the times, a
bit like fashion trends, while others stick around. Either way,
they can be either a source of delight or confusion
for those who hear them. Take, for example, don't put
all your eggs in one basket. It's a great warning
design to help people make wise decisions about how much effort, investment,

(05:55):
and hope to put into a particular endeavor. And there's
also don't count your chickens before they hatch, meant to
urge caution when enthusiasm gets the better of us. And
in keeping with our egg theme, there's also the phrase
lay an egg. For a very long time, it's been
an idiom that simply means to perform poorly. A local
theater group that botches a performance of Fiddler on the

(06:16):
Roof might receive a bad review in their local paper
that claims the director laid an egg. I think you
get the idea. To lay an egg is to fail
at something, but not always. In fact, once there was
a woman who built her life around laying eggs, and
she had much success with it. Her name was Gertrude Smith,
and as a child in York, Pennsylvania, she discovered that

(06:39):
she had the most amazing ability. According to her, she
could stand near her chicken coop and silently mentally command
them to lay eggs. Not just any eggs, though these
were eggs with images on them. Don't take my word
for it. Here's a short quote from the York Gazette
and Daily, a newspaper in Pennsylvania near where she grew up,

(07:00):
who interviewed her many years later in nineteen forty. I
would stand near the hen yard and visualized sunflower petals
along with my initials. In a few days, my father
came into the house all excited and said, here is
the sunflower egg. According to Gertrude, the designs weren't just
made out of color. Instead, they were physically inset into

(07:21):
the hard surface of the egg shells, so deeply in set,
in fact, that they were visible from the inside of
the shell as well as you can imagine. Seeing results
like that was a complete shock to Gertrude and her family.
She had done nothing more than stand near the birds
and envisioned sunflowers, and yet there they were, engraved by
some other worldly hand on the shell of an egg

(07:43):
that had just been laid. In fact, it was her
excitement that led to that article about her in nineteen forty.
She had grown up since those early days, but kept
a small handful of those egg shells to show friends
and impress visitors, and in her letter to the gazette
she offered to show those shells to a reporter. When
she showed up at the office of the newspaper a
week later, they confirmed what she had claimed. They were

(08:05):
a handful of egg shells, each bearing the striking image
of a sunflower with its round center and radiating petals.
The paper published to follow up to confirm that Gertrude
had indeed pass their test. But all good things must
come to an end. It seems that Gertrude wasn't so
sure about the safety of her new found gift. If
she could use her mind to physically alter the shell

(08:28):
of a chicken's egg, what if she destroyed one by mistake.
Wondering if her amazing ability was limited to cute floral engravings,
she spent some time with her chickens again, this time
visualizing an egg with the triangular cross section cut out
of it. When the chicken lay the egg, Gertrude was
horrified to see that her instructions had been followed to
the letter. From that day forward, Gertrude Smith refused to

(08:51):
use her powers to alter another egg. What the world
saw as something special and a huge success, she could
only see as a failure, And in doing so, I
suppose she brought the old idiom to life. At least
in her mind. Gertrude Smith was the one who laid
an egg. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of

(09:15):
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 learn all about it

(09:37):
over at the World of Lore dot com. And until
next time, stay curious. Ye