Witchy

Stories can drive people to do some unusual things, as these two additions to the Cabinet will show you.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Aaron Manke'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):
Salem has a long and notorious past with witches. The
infamous Salem Witch Trials saw hundreds of innocent people, including
children as young as four, accused of cavorting with the
forces of darkness, and contrary to popular belief, they were
not burned at the stake. Rather, they were hanged for
their alleged crimes. Despite their novelty over the past three
hundred and thirty years, the Salem Witch Trials only lasted

(00:59):
for one year between sixteen ninety two and sixteen ninety three,
or did they Some time later, a panic gripped the
Salem area. According to the newspapers, this small American town
had become ground zero for a new threat. The devil
had come to Salem, and a warlock was responsible. A
local farmer named Jacob Culp suddenly found himself mired in controversy.

(01:22):
Jacob had come to America from Germany, and he was
described by the press as a quiet, unpretentious individual. His
mother had recently passed away, and Jacob was at her
funeral when he noticed his relatives were acting strange. He
tried asking them what was wrong, but every person he
spoke to simply turned away without a word. They could
barely stand to look at him. Several days later, he

(01:45):
spoke to a reverend at his local church about why
his family had been shutting him out. At first, the
reverend refused to say anything, but eventually he let Jacob
know what was going on. His relatives had accused him
of being a wizard, but this farmer wasn't a to
hop a train to a magic school inside a castle. Instead,
he would be subjected to a battery of questions and examinations.

(02:07):
Thanks to Sadie and Fanny Loup, his sisters in law,
their mother, Lydia, had fallen ill. The doctors couldn't make
heads or tails of her condition, and none of their
treatments were working, so her daughters sent for doctor Peter Burns,
a local physician known as the pow Wow Doctor. He
examined Lydia and told the girls that a close relative

(02:27):
had bewitched her. He recommended that they get a second
opinion from another doctor, a guy named Andrew hoff. Hoff
was a seventy seven year old physician who confirmed Burne's
diagnosis Jacob had been perverted by an evil power. He
advised the family not to look the man in the
eyes or get too close to him. Doctor's orders, lest
they wanted to find themselves under his spell. Within a year,

(02:51):
hoff promised that he would expel the devil from the
farmer's body. So why had Sadie and Fanny accused their
brother in law in the first place? While the answer
there is a bit of complicated family life. Jacob had
been married to Sadie's aunt Hannah until her untimely death.
After she was gone, he wed her niece, Hattie, who
happened to be Sadie's sister. Apparently, Sadie had given birth

(03:12):
to a son out of wedlock several years prior, and
it was believed that Jacob was the father of that child,
but no one could prove it. On top of all
of that, Jacob had done well for himself in business,
much more so than the rest of the family, and
they resented his success, so the Loop sisters and their
husbands accused him of hypnotizing his neighbors in order to

(03:32):
steal from them and to make matters worse. They also
claimed that he had performed black magic on animals. Soon
after the accusation started to fly, Lydia Loop passed away,
and her daughters took their claims to the church. They
presented their case to Homer B. Shelton, their class leader,
as well as others in the congregation, and the church
did what it always did with accusations of witchcraft in

(03:55):
the community. They put the accusers on trial instead. That's right.
Rather than put mister Culp on trial for being a
wizard or a warlock, the Heart's Methodist Episcopal Church turned
the tables on the Loops for their greedy and immoral
attempts to discredit an honorable man. Sadie, Fanny, and the
rest of the family were all expelled from the church
the following January, while Jacob Culp was found innocent of

(04:18):
all charges, a surprising turn of events given Salem's history
with accusations of witchcraft, But this situation was different for
a few reasons. You see the witch trials of Salem,
Massachusetts did end in sixteen ninety three, but this particular
trial occurred in eighteen ninety four in Salem, Ohio. In

(04:52):
southern New Mexico, in the Embryo Basin, there is a
small mountain only about five five hundred feet high. It's
called Vitorio Peak, and looking at it, you might not
think it's much It's made up mostly of rocks, sagebrush,
and rattlesnakes. But Milton Ernest Noss, better known as Doc,
had found a lot more than just a bunch of
rocks and dirt. He'd come from Oklahoma to seek adventure

(05:15):
in the open Southwest, marrying a woman named Ova Babe
Beckworth in nineteen thirty three, before planting his feet in
Hot Springs, New Mexico for good four years later. In
November of nineteen thirty seven, Doc was on a hunting
trip with his wife and a few friends. Now accounts
differed depending on who was telling the story, but one
version claims that as the group set up camp at

(05:35):
the base of Victoria Peak, Doc set out on his
own to continue the hunt. He hiked up the mountain
in search of deer until the skies suddenly opened and
it started to rain, so he sought out refuge beneath
a large ledge near the top of the peak, and
as he waited for the weather to change, he looked
down at his feet. There was a large rock, one
that appeared to have been touched by human hands. So

(05:58):
he crouched down and he tried to move it, but
it was too heavy, so instead he duck around it
until he was able to get his fingers underneath. Then
he heaved it out of the way. It had been
blocking a hole in the ground, one that seemed to
go on forever. Doc looked inside and saw what he
felt was a mine shaft, so when the rain stopped,
he ran back to his wife to tell her what

(06:19):
he had found. They didn't share their news with the
rest of the group, though. Instead he and Babe came
back a few days later alone to explore the shaft.
Armed with ropes and flashlights, they repelled down roughly sixty
feet until they found themselves in a small ante chamber.
The walls of the room were covered in drawings, perhaps
painted by a local Native American tribe long ago, and

(06:41):
there was another narrow shaft that kept going down into
the mountain. By the time they'd reached the end. They
had descended another one hundred and eighty six feet. The
pair entered a massive cave about two thy seven hundred
feet long, where Doc immediately noticed a human skeleton. Considering
the tunnel was man made, perhaps one of the workers
had died during the dig, Except the skeleton was on

(07:02):
its knees and had been tied to a stake in
the ground, and its hands were tied behind its back.
And it wasn't the only one. In total, there were
twenty seven human skeletons in the Victorio Peak, well, twenty
seven the Doc Noss had found at least He and
his wife, though, pressed on deeper into the cavern, and
those skeletons gave way to treasure, gold, coins, jewelry, statues,

(07:25):
and historical objects, including a solid gold statue of the
Virgin Mary. There was also a pile of letters dated
as recently as eighteen eighty. But Victorio Peak still had
more to offer, because beyond that treasure room there were
stacks of iron bars, thousands of them. Well that's what
Doc thought at first. Each bar weighed as much as

(07:45):
forty pounds, and after careful inspection, it was Babe who
realized that they weren't iron at all. They were gold.
Thousands of bars of gold, just sitting in the middle
of a mountain in New Mexico. Who had put them there?
And why was going to wait around to find out?
He started filling his pockets with whatever he could carry
and climb back out to the surface with Ova. Together

(08:08):
they set up camp near the entrance to the cave
and spent the next few years hauling out bars of gold, jewelry,
and anything else they could get their hands on. But
the story doesn't end there. In nineteen thirty nine, Doc
tried to make a wider opening to get the treasure
out more easily. Instead, he accidentally caused a cave in
and blocked off all access for good. He worked for

(08:29):
nine long years to sell those two hundred gold bars
that he and Babe had managed to smuggle out, but
had no luck, not until he met a man named
Charlie Ryan in nineteen forty eight. Ryan agreed to buy
fifty one of those bars. But there was something about
this Ryan guy that rubbed Doc the wrong way. So
rather than sell the gold, Noss and a buddy buried
it in a new hiding spot instead. Well, Ryan didn't

(08:52):
like being given the run around, so he confronted Doc
the next day with a gun. Noss tried to get away,
but he couldn't outrun a bullet. Ryan shot and killed
him where he stood. Babe and her children worked for
the next three years to try and clear out the
rocks blocking the entrance to the cave, but they were
only twelve yards from the main cavern when their efforts
were halted. The US Army had commandeered the land around

(09:15):
Victorio Peak for missile testing and kicked Babe and the
nos family out for good. Of course, rumors of the
treasure started floating around among the troops and they decided
to finish what the Nosses had started. Pretty soon, the
soldiers struck gold, literally, but rather than let them keep
it for themselves, the army set off dynamite to block
access to the treasure permanently. Since then, others, including Babe Noss,

(09:39):
have tried to find their way back into the cave
to claim the rest of the treasure, but to no avail.
As far as the rumors and legends will tell us,
that treasure is still there today waiting to be found.
Maybe Nicholas Cage is available to take on the job.

(09:59):
Hop If 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 Mankey in partnership
with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show
called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show,

(10:22):
and you can learn all about it over at the
Worldoflore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.