The Bone Collector

Some curious stories are built by the living, and some are made possible by the dead.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild. 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.

(00:36):
It was a cold winter night in nineteen forty two,
and quiet blanketed the Eastern Front as thick as fresh
fallen snow. A dozen Nazi soldiers were huddled in their tents,
shivering against the bitter Russian cold. The steady rhythmic beeps
of the lufoffas officer's radar screen signaled clear skies, and

(00:57):
only static filled the airways. It had been a night.
With any luck, it would stay that way. The officer
sat up as a faint sound came to him over
the mechanical worrying of his instruments. Somewhere far above, he
could hear a noise like a soft wind, whooshing through
the willow branches. His face fell. They were here. Even

(01:19):
as he yelled to raise the alarm, he could see
it was too late. The first bomb was already exploding.
Against the command center, painting the night sky red with fire.
The night Witches had struck again. In the final years
of World War Two, one of the most feared ally
air squadrons of the Eastern Front was the Soviet five
hundred and eighty eighth Night Bomber Regiment. The five hundred

(01:42):
and eighty eighth was nicknamed the Knackhexen or the night
Witches by the Germans, not just because their planes made
a sound like a sweeping room, but because every member
of the five eighty eighth, from mechanics to pilots, were women.
The Soviet Union hadn't intended to have women on the
front line at all. When Hitler invaded Russia in the

(02:03):
summer of nineteen forty one, Joseph Stalin believed his Red
Army would easily defeat the Nazis. By the fall, his
outlook was less rosy. The Nazis had proven stubborn and
Leningrad was under siege. Thousands of young men had been
captured or killed. So when female flying ace Marina Raskova
approached him with a plan for an all female regiment,

(02:24):
Stalin gave her the go ahead. Despite his approval, Marina's
regiment did not have an easy time of it. Her
recruits had just months to master skills that airman learned
for years. Every woman had to be pilots, navigator, maintenance
and ground crew, and of course the male soldiers didn't
take kindly to what they called the little girls serving

(02:45):
on the front line. As a result, Marina's flyers got
the absolute worst equipment. The five eighty eighth were given
Polykarpov P two biplanes. These little wooden two seater boxes
were used as crop dusters and never meant to fly
in combat. They had virtually no protection from the freezing
Soviet winter, they moved incredibly slow, making them an easy

(03:06):
target for anti aircraft guns, and on top of all
of that, they could barely carry any weight. Marina's pilots
flew without radios, guns, radar. Even parachutes were too heavy
for the planes to carry, and for the same reason,
the planes could only transfer two bombs at a time,
meaning in every raid the pilots would have to fly
back and forth dozens of times between their base and

(03:29):
the target. Each attack, pilots and navigators would be in
the air for upwards of ten hours. Any one of
these issues might have made their goal, which was to
bomb Nazi camps and supply lines on the Eastern Front,
seem impossible, but Marina's Night Witches turned their issues into advantages.
The night Witches only ran missions under cover of darkness.

(03:51):
Their tiny planes were too small to get picked up
by radar. Since they had no radios, they couldn't be
spotted by someone listening to the airwaves. Only that, but
their fastest speed was slower than the stall speed of
Nazi planes, meaning that they could outmaneuver German pilots easily.
The only sign the night Witches were there was the
telltale woosh of their wooden planes. From nineteen forty one

(04:15):
to nineteen forty five, members of the five eighty eighth
flew more than twenty four thousand combat missions, dropping three
thousand tons of bombs on the Germans. They were the
most highly decorated unit of the Soviet Air Force during
the war, and so feared by the Nazis that any
German who downed a night Witch was awarded the Iron Cross,

(04:35):
and when their leader, Marina Raskova's plane was shot down,
she was given the very first state funeral of World
War II and had her ashes buried in the Kremlin,
The Night Witches opened the door for women to serve
in combat in the Soviet Union. Marina eventually staffed three
all female bombing regiments, with the Night Witches being the
most famous of these. Still, even after all of their accomplishments,

(04:58):
they faced discrimination on the home front. Despite their impeccable record,
they weren't allowed to fly their planes in Moscow's end
of war victory parade. It wasn't them, the organizers claimed,
it was their equipment, the planes that took them back
and forth across the Eastern Front, that carried three thousand
tons of bombs and scared the wits out of the Nazis.

(05:19):
Those planes, they said, were just too slow. There is
a moment in a lot of horror movies that's critical

(05:40):
to the film success. It's usually right after the protagonist's
first real ghost sighting, when the poltergeist activity or demonic
possession spikes and we finally know what we're dealing with.
It's that moment when many audience members lose their suspension
of disbelief, because when the character knows the ghosts surreal,
you expect them to run and not look back. Any

(06:02):
behavior that doesn't involve removing themselves from the situation as
soon as possible just seems implausible. After all, if you've
ever seen empirical evidence that your house is haunted, wouldn't
you move as well? That's exactly what six year old
Jiang Bowl wanted to know after his first ghost encounter.
The Taiwanese boy was climbing around his family's attic one

(06:23):
day when he saw something that made his blood run cold,
a horrific spectral figure with no eyes, no nose, and
no mouth. Jiang wasted no time in getting out of there.
He fled the attic and didn't stop running until he
found his dad, But when he told him what happened,
he was stunned by the response he got. His dad

(06:43):
already knew about the ghost, but had given up about
doing anything about it. He wanted to move, but they
couldn't afford to live anywhere else at the moment. They were,
as Jiang put it later, poorer than the ghosts. That
experience affected Jiang deeply, and he made sure that he
didn't find himself in that position ever again. First by
dragging himself out of poverty. He grew up and built

(07:06):
a successful business as a fung shwe consultant, now for
the uninitiated. Fung shwe is the ancient Chinese art of
arranging physical items in an environment for maximum harmony. It's
rooted in Taoism, but it's popular all over the world.
Today in the West, we almost exclusively associated with interior design.
Someone might tell you that your living room is bad

(07:28):
fung shui if the furniture is laid out poorly, But
it has applications outside the home as well, from gardening
to architectural design. In fact, some of the earliest uses
were in ancient Chinese graveyards. It was thought that the
proper flow of energy was critical for the spirits of
the dead to rest peacefully. That history may be what
inspired Jiang to look beyond the home of some of

(07:50):
his trickster clients. Through the course of his work as
a consultant, he occasionally encountered people who seemed to practice
perfect fung shwe, but who were never the less plagued
by illness or bad luck. Rather than giving up, he
set out to inspect the graveyards of their recently deceased relatives.
In many cases, he found that the graves had been damaged,

(08:11):
allowing moisture or other problems to affect the human remains.
Jiang theorized that the ghosts were uncomfortable as a result,
and had decided to curse their descendants with bad luck
until someone fixed the problem. So he did just that.
In addition to his Functue consulting work, he began offering
his services as a bone collector. He would dig up

(08:33):
the graves of his client's ancestors, painstakingly clean and dry
the remains, and then place the bones inside a large urn.
Jiang believed that the remains had to be arranged for
maximum comfort and harmony, which usually involved placing them in
a sitting position. A lump of charcoal was added to
the urn to make sure they stayed dry. Then the
whole thing was reburied in the original grave, and according

(08:57):
to Jiang, the practice had incredible results, instantly curing everything
from headaches to mania in his clients and their family members.
And perhaps that claim stretches your suspension of disbelief, but
Jiang's success as a bone collector speaks for itself. He
has many satisfied customers. So if you feel some disharmony

(09:17):
in your life, maybe Functionue can help. But before you
go rearranging your living room for the one hundredth time,
reconsider whether the problem might be less with your furniture
and more with your ancestors. If so, it's probably the
sort of thing you should take care of sooner rather
than later, because there's nothing worse than a ghost with
a bone to pick. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided

(09:44):
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 Mankey in partnership with how Stuff Works. I make
another a war winning show called Lore, which is a podcast,
book series, and television show, and you can learn all

(10:05):
about it over at Theworldoflore dot com. And until next time,
stay curious.