February 9, 2024 • 25 mins
Holly and Tracy discuss the unfortunate and gruesome event that allegedly happened at Anne-Marie-Louse's funeral. Harrison Dyar's compulsion and cruelty are also examined.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, A production
of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday and Holly Frye and
I'm Tracy V. Wilson. We talked about Annri Louis d'argeon
this week. Yeah, I didn't realize that the timing of
(00:22):
her life dovetails nicely with Vandyck. Oh. Yeah, that's kind
of like, here's two things that were going on kind
of simultaneously, since he was trying to get the commission
to decorate some of the palace for Louis the thirteenth
and didn't get it. There are several things we did
not that Die didn't include in the actual show for
(00:44):
various reasons, some that it would just require. I mean,
I felt like we had to spend so much time
explaining how the frond worked, because there anytime I've read
about it in the past, when I haven't done like
a deep enough dive, I always walk away scratching my
head and going, wait, I thought those guys were friends,
like not under standing that whole turn that happened right
when Parliament was like we got a good deal for us,
(01:05):
guys and the nobility were like, excuse one of the
things that we didn't talk about though, is Anne of
Austria and Mazarin's rumors we have no substantiation that they
were in fact romantically involved. Yeah, we talked about that
in our hortenth the Marie. Yeah, like we can talk
(01:28):
about it. It was a brief mention, right that. Yeah,
which you know, there are even rumors that they secretly
got married. Yeah. And this is a thing that I
don't know how to feel about, not specific to them,
but in general, I feel like any time, especially when
(01:49):
there is a woman regent, like a mother to a monarch,
who is kind of running things and she is a
male advisor, the rumor is always that they're having an
a fan or that they are in love or possibly
even married. I mean we even see this with like
Queen Victoria's mother and her advisor, Like there are even
(02:10):
theories that that man is actually Victoria's father in some circles,
and then even Victoria and her advisors, And like, there's
part of me that's like, is there no way people
could imagine that a man and woman could be working
together and not have some sort of romance between them, right,
(02:32):
And then on the other hand, I'm like it's all
so insulated and weird. I could see it being very
natural for two people in that position where they're constantly
together and the only two people that can really understand
the other's life situation, where that would kind of magically
set the alchemy to in play of like a romance developing.
(02:56):
I don't know. I mean, the bottom line is people
will always speculate about whether or not any two people
secretly are having some sort of romance. It just always
makes me think about these things. I have no like
summation or position on it. I just always find myself going, yeah,
(03:16):
but it just is that the only thing we could
possibly massine, the only option, right, like maybe they could
just be BFFs you. I mean, I don't know. The
other thing that we didn't mention is that Anne Marie
Louise connects to another podcast we did not that long ago,
which is Jean Baptiste Lulie h the Conductor, because she
(03:37):
is the one who brought him to French court for
the first time, and so that's pretty fascinating. Nothing more
than that fascinating. Okay, here's the gross part. Okay, gross parte.
If you are squeamish about post mortem yuckiness, I don't know,
maybe skip ahead a minute and a half. Allegedly at
(04:00):
the funeral, something had gone wrong with her embalming, and
there was an urn. I don't know why this would
be the case. I'm sure there's some reason, but there
was an urn that would have had entrails in it, okay,
and allegedly it exploded. Oh gross. And this was at
(04:23):
the brand new area that had been built of Versailles.
So her, like some people have joked, her parting gift
was just to stink up Versailles on her way out
because it was apparently utterly disgusting. I don't know if
this is true or not. Yeah, I'm having question marks
about like exactly what right? Me too, Like what was
(04:44):
happening with embalming at this point? Well, and the thing is,
even if embalming was well established at this point, there
is always the possibility that one guy got it wrong. Now, Yeah,
like I know, in North America, it's a compareative recent thing,
like a nineteenth century thing, not a so yeah. Yeah.
(05:07):
But still there's also the factor that, right, we are
getting these accounts. This came up in that Sackville West biography,
and so we're getting that account translated, and I also
have that thing of like has anybody gone back to
retranslate it, or even are there things that the best
translator might not get because there's some nuance in the
(05:31):
wording that we that is completely out of practice now
that nobody that wasn't even very popular to begin with,
like some turn a phrase, so don't I don't know.
That's why I didn't want to include it. One because yuck,
and two because I feel like there's some mystery as
to whether or not it's true. But it's it's a
funny thing to think about that. Even on the way out,
(05:52):
she kind of flipped the bird to the mark. Uh nope.
So two things. The first thing is what you were
saying about like very old documents being translated. It reminded
me a little bit of these annotated editions of Jane
Austen's novels that I have, where it really is like
(06:13):
the page of the novel on one page and the
facing page and all annotations on it, and how much
of that is just explaining things that is not not
terminology we use now, not how we think about things now,
stuff like that, where like it would be like that
furnishings meant furniture like that one came up several times
(06:36):
reason I remember it. But when there was one of
the things that we were reading that was a quote
from her, and I stumbled over it and you were like,
I don't know what that means. And I had a
moment where it reminded me of that, of like reading
through all of these annotations that just explained things that
just aren't things that we say or do now so much.
The other thing is I was reading the outline for
(06:58):
this episode when you sent me out, when you sent
it over to me, and I got to the part
where it said Victoria Sackville West, and I was like, oh,
that's funny. Is she related to Vita Sackville West? Because
it had just never occurred to me that her full
first name was Victoria. Yeah, Like I have never heard
(07:24):
her referred to as anything. I've admittedly, like never read
a full complete biography of her or anything, but like,
I have always heard her referred to as Vita Sackville West.
So I just immediately assumed that this Victoria was some
other person. She was not one and the same. Yes, listen,
I'm always gonna say Victoria because I love it.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
Yeah, oh, Anne, Marie Louise, Yeah, I really, I mean
I said it to you during one of our breaks,
but I really marvel at her being actively engaged in battle.
Speaker 1 (08:03):
Yeah, and I likened it too. You know, if if
somebody like Paris Hilton was like, yeah, I'm gonna get
involved in active combat, you'd be like, what it was
that sort of unusual. And there are a lot of
interesting paintings of her that kind of borrow from that
(08:26):
Amazon nickname. She was apparently a very big personality and
people liked being around her, whether she liked being around
them or not. That I do also find it really
interesting that someone that was so central to life at
(08:47):
court and seemed to love it was suddenly like let's
run away and not be part of this at all.
But that's also, you know, kind of the beginning of
that trend that happened by the time we get to
Louis the sixteenth, like where you know, like Marie Antoinette
got really into Russou and was like, let's live out
in nature and had a tiny farm built for herself.
(09:10):
Those are connected ideas, they're just yeah, they're a little
ways apart on the timeline, but like they're in the
same vein of trend in the royalty. Yeah, I don't,
I don't. I don't want a farm. I mean, farms
are neat to visit. But I can't imagine me like,
let's go live in the middle of nowhere. We'll put
(09:33):
some hermit holes in the forest. And also, to me,
it's one of those things that just seems like the
indulgent fantasy of a privileged mind, right, Like the more
appealing thing to me would be like kind of like
a neighborhood. Yeah, but more like the houses are arranged
(09:56):
around like a central common area. Yeah, and all of
my friends live in them, and so I can just
like walk next door to my friend's house and in
the summertime we can all, you know, hang out in
the nice weather, cook some food, and not have to
do this situation where it's like I got to drive
(10:18):
twenty minutes or take an hour on the train to go,
yeah see a friend. Yeah, that's really the options. Twenty
minutes in the car an hour on the train, right.
I always say that if I magically were to like
win the lottery, yeah, I would just make offers to
all of our neighbors, yeah, to buy their houses. So
(10:41):
one is obviously for like shoes, shoe house, and you know,
the various things I have purchased too much of and
need more space for. But that others we would fix
up to be like, you know, anybody who needs a
place to live can hang right, just maybe put a
roller rink in one of them. That's one of the
(11:01):
that's one of my big things lately to think.
Speaker 3 (11:03):
About, right, come on, lottery.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
He talked about Harrison Dyer. This week we did we're
recording other episodes after this one that are coming out
next week. And I have said this is accidental drama
week because there's so much drama in this episode and
then there's so much drama that's a little sneak preview
also accidental but high faith theme, oh yeah, yeah, random,
(11:41):
And I didn't go into that very much here. There's
so much I didn't go into. I don't either in
the upcoming ones. And I this this may sound frightening initially,
but I feel like I understand Harrison Dyer on one level,
yeah right, because he is clearly compulsive. Like you know,
(12:03):
Mark Epstein kind of lays out the case in his
book that like if you look at the way he
did all of his work, like the way he kept
his notes, the way he lived his life in all
other ways. He had compulsion issues. Right, he never did
anything by half measure. He had to have all of
the insects specimens. Yet and I totally get that. I
have that that same drive to like I wanted to
(12:26):
dig to the center of the earth as a kid,
I tried to cordon off the playground sandbox so that
people would not mess up my project. I understand. I
understand all of that. I understand. I listen. I have
a shoe problem, I have a fabric problem, I have
all of the collecting of things problems. I get compulsion.
But where I'm like, wait a minute, is that like
(12:49):
then to kind of make that into like a tool
of cruelty is very weird to me. Sure, And That's
where I'm like, dude, you could have just been a
fun cook instead of a jerk and we would have
loved you. And who made up a whole person in
(13:10):
order to be a big a mess in order to
be a big a miss? And there are some interesting
theories about his bigamy. One thing that came up that
I thought was really really interesting was in that Nevada
Supreme court case where they heard the appeal of Wileska's
divorce is there's nurse testimony where they have the nurse
(13:33):
who delivered or was present at the hospital where they
delivered several of Wileska's kids. I don't know if it
was all three or just one or two, but she
was like, oh, you know, I thought it was odd
that this other guy was there and that he would
lie down in bed with her at the hospital. And
I'm like, what, there's like an element of it where
(13:55):
they're they're both so cloak and daggery and so brazen
about the whole thing that I'm like, this is just bananas. Yeah,
And the idea that like, she tied up so much
valuable time in the legal system trying to divorce her
imaginary friend because she accidentally had a paper trayl of
(14:19):
that imaginary friend that she had to get rid of
to marry the guy she actually wanted to be married
to who was her imaginary friend. Like, it's just it's
very Yeah, it's a lot. There's a whole lot. And
that's not even the tunnels. No, I mean I find
that whole part way more interesting than the tunnels. Actually, obviously,
I just find the tunnel part scary because the idea
(14:44):
that he was I mean, it does seem like some
of his neighbors knew about it at least at one point. Yeah.
I kind of think if I had been a neighbor,
I might have raised the alarm of being like, hey,
this guy's tunneling big giant tunnels and my house is
going to be struck really unsound. Well, I will say this.
Here are my two thoughts on why nobody raised a
(15:05):
stink Okay, even though he was not an engineer. I
think because he was respected as an intellectual, they thought like,
he knows what he's doing. And also, I don't think
they realized how extensive. They weren't sure. I think they
just thought like that guy just loves to dig. I
don't know, he's just moving dirt around down there. Yeah,
(15:28):
I bet they did not realize how far it went.
That also seems to be the case with the person
tunneling on TikTok. I have not been into the tunnel
TikTok very much, but it digbors are mad about it.
Her neighbors are mad about it, for sure. But it
also seems like the projects she initially started of I'm
(15:48):
gonna make like a sort of bunker slash shelter expanded
into something much much bigger, and like that was when
it really became a problem for the neighbors. That's at
least my cursory understanding of having not gone down that
rabbit hole on the TikTok because it stresses me out. Yeah,
(16:10):
that's more or less my take on it as well.
And I too have not gone deep into it because
I'm just like, ugh, I can't with that level of drama.
Here is an interesting thing that ties some of this
weird bigamy issue together in a strange way. There's still okay,
we're making a constellation of data points here that I'm like, huh.
(16:34):
Five days after Zella and Harrison got married, Harrison's sister
Pearl got married to a man named Siguard Adolphus Knop.
Was this a real person, Yes, to a real person
who was a doctor and a eugenicist. Oh dear, Oh,
(16:55):
so I'm surprising to have eugenics at this point in history.
And there have been some efforts at trying to understand
Harrison's behavior in this double life, and eugenics plays a
part in it because there are two big chunks of
(17:19):
material where a lot of information that we have about
him in terms of availability to present day come from.
And one is a series of articles that came out
in The Washington Post in twenty twelve written by John
Kelly where he kind of lays out the whole story.
And then we have Epstein's book, and both of them
(17:43):
mentioned that it seems as though Harrison was himself a
eugenicist who believed his genetics were superior, oh dear, and
that this may have been both the real catalyst for
his conflicts with Zella, because she was not and also
(18:05):
she ended up having hearing loss that she thought was genetic,
and so that is why she did not want to
have more children, and thus he went, well, I got
to have more children with someone, oh dear, and that
that may have been his It's a little bit tricky, right,
because I don't want anyone to think like that justifies it,
(18:28):
or we're trying to say that that explains it, but
it is an explainer of his behavior, which is still bad. Right.
And there's also this thing that comes up periodically, and
I'm like, this gets real squirrely of people wanting to
(18:52):
kind of carefully suggest that Zella had stopped having sex
with him, and that that's why he was driven to
another woman. I have very strong feelings about this, which
are like, cool, if that relationship is a worker for
you anymore, get out of it and then go find
what makes you happy. But don't this degree of concoction
(19:16):
of a completely fake thing and very purposely lying right unacceptable? Yeah,
it's super duper weird to me, and it's so yuckis
I don't?
Speaker 2 (19:30):
So?
Speaker 1 (19:30):
Yeah, he he's a monster. He also in Being a
Jerk would we mentioned a little bit of his his
fiction writing which we didn't get into deeply, that he did,
and which he included sometimes in the publication Reality and
(19:54):
he would do these really really it's almost like you know,
self in assertion friend fiction that he would do in
some of these stories, because a lot of his stories
were clearly about things that were part of his life,
like like having two families, like having But he did
one after he went after miss Mitchell for her book
(20:19):
and she sued him. He later wrote a short story
called The Taming of a Suffragette in which she is
clearly a character in it that is very thinly veiled
that of course becomes like you know, not the hero
of the piece, that's for sure. This is another accidental
theme between today. I like this episode on Dire and
(20:40):
like our next week episodes. I feel like people are
gonna start guessing in the listener mail of what next
week's episodes are because next week's episodes also have a
number of purported works of fiction that were like thinly
veiled autobiography. Yeah, yeah, I have such a list. I
don't want to hit everything. You're probably wondering, or if
(21:01):
you haven't, maybe you will now what happened to those tunnels? Well, yeah,
that's a great question. His old neighborhood still structurally unsound.
The tunnels at fifteen twelve twenty First Street got left
there for a while. One of the sets of tunnels
(21:22):
I think that second house on B Street got sold
to the government, and well LESCA thought they were using
it to like the tunnels to grow mushrooms as like
part of a scientific experiment. And then later there was
actually some discussion of and I think even legislation introduced
of like hey, we got these perfectly good tunnels under Washington,
(21:43):
d C. Why don't we use them as like raid shelters,
Like why don't we fortify them and actually make them
into spaces that can have public benefit. And a survey
was done and it was determined they aren't really big
enough to work that way, even though they're pretty big,
like just in terms of like the narrowness of spaces
and putting people in cramp spaces in an emergency that
(22:03):
was not really viable. And then the Big tunnel, apparently
in nineteen fifty eight, started to collapse. And one of
the things that's interesting, this is kind of the end
of Epstein's book, is when he mentions that there's this
kind of interesting timing where as that tunnel was starting
(22:24):
to collapse and Dyer's name came up in the news again,
his kids from each of his family visited that tunnel
like as a like, okay, here's what my dad did,
and like that's the one thing that brought them sort
of together. They didn't seem to interact or anything. It
was like one was there at one point in the
day and okay, and I'm just like, this is the
weirdest this is the weirdest code, to the weirdest story,
(22:45):
to the weirdest behavior. Yeah, there is a really fun
note that I want to end his story on because
it's not about him at all, Okay, it is about
his collaborator, JB. Smith, who worked a lot in this
as well, his fellow entomologist. And I mean when I
say these two men went at it like there are
(23:09):
if you wanted to do just an episode on scientific
argument m we could easily do it and read their
correspondence back and forth and things that they wrote to
other people about each other, and things they put in
journals about each other and like. But someone at some
point had kind of pointedly asked JB. Smith, like, why
do you still work with this man if you clearly
(23:29):
have so many problems? And his response was, I am
more interested in mosquitoes than in quarreling, okay. And I'm like,
that is probably the best attitude anyone could have in
dealing with someone like Harrison Dyer, I agree, who clearly
loved to quarrel, loved it, and loved to make his
(23:51):
life complicated. I imagine him down there digging, being like, man,
what did I do? I'm really in it, Like I
got two families to support, I got a lot of problems,
and I made them all myself. I don't know compulsion.
I get the cruelty not so much. Right. If this
(24:14):
is your weekend coming up, we hope you don't have
to deal with anybody quarrelsome complicated, or in any way
possibly passing themselves off as a fictional person. If you
have to work or have other responsibilities that don't give
you this time off, I still hope you don't have
to deal with any of that, and I hope you
(24:34):
get some time for yourself. We will be right back
here tomorrow with a classic episode, and then again on
Monday with something brand new. Stuff you missed in History
Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
(24:55):
to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, A production
of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday and Holly Frye and
I'm Tracy V. Wilson. We talked about Annri Louis d'argeon
this week. Yeah, I didn't realize that the timing of
(00:22):
her life dovetails nicely with Vandyck. Oh. Yeah, that's kind
of like, here's two things that were going on kind
of simultaneously, since he was trying to get the commission
to decorate some of the palace for Louis the thirteenth
and didn't get it. There are several things we did
not that Die didn't include in the actual show for
(00:44):
various reasons, some that it would just require. I mean,
I felt like we had to spend so much time
explaining how the frond worked, because there anytime I've read
about it in the past, when I haven't done like
a deep enough dive, I always walk away scratching my
head and going, wait, I thought those guys were friends,
like not under standing that whole turn that happened right
when Parliament was like we got a good deal for us,
(01:05):
guys and the nobility were like, excuse one of the
things that we didn't talk about though, is Anne of
Austria and Mazarin's rumors we have no substantiation that they
were in fact romantically involved. Yeah, we talked about that
in our hortenth the Marie. Yeah, like we can talk
(01:28):
about it. It was a brief mention, right that. Yeah,
which you know, there are even rumors that they secretly
got married. Yeah. And this is a thing that I
don't know how to feel about, not specific to them,
but in general, I feel like any time, especially when
(01:49):
there is a woman regent, like a mother to a monarch,
who is kind of running things and she is a
male advisor, the rumor is always that they're having an
a fan or that they are in love or possibly
even married. I mean we even see this with like
Queen Victoria's mother and her advisor, Like there are even
(02:10):
theories that that man is actually Victoria's father in some circles,
and then even Victoria and her advisors, And like, there's
part of me that's like, is there no way people
could imagine that a man and woman could be working
together and not have some sort of romance between them, right,
(02:32):
And then on the other hand, I'm like it's all
so insulated and weird. I could see it being very
natural for two people in that position where they're constantly
together and the only two people that can really understand
the other's life situation, where that would kind of magically
set the alchemy to in play of like a romance developing.
(02:56):
I don't know. I mean, the bottom line is people
will always speculate about whether or not any two people
secretly are having some sort of romance. It just always
makes me think about these things. I have no like
summation or position on it. I just always find myself going, yeah,
(03:16):
but it just is that the only thing we could
possibly massine, the only option, right, like maybe they could
just be BFFs you. I mean, I don't know. The
other thing that we didn't mention is that Anne Marie
Louise connects to another podcast we did not that long ago,
which is Jean Baptiste Lulie h the Conductor, because she
(03:37):
is the one who brought him to French court for
the first time, and so that's pretty fascinating. Nothing more
than that fascinating. Okay, here's the gross part. Okay, gross parte.
If you are squeamish about post mortem yuckiness, I don't know,
maybe skip ahead a minute and a half. Allegedly at
(04:00):
the funeral, something had gone wrong with her embalming, and
there was an urn. I don't know why this would
be the case. I'm sure there's some reason, but there
was an urn that would have had entrails in it, okay,
and allegedly it exploded. Oh gross. And this was at
(04:23):
the brand new area that had been built of Versailles.
So her, like some people have joked, her parting gift
was just to stink up Versailles on her way out
because it was apparently utterly disgusting. I don't know if
this is true or not. Yeah, I'm having question marks
about like exactly what right? Me too, Like what was
(04:44):
happening with embalming at this point? Well, and the thing is,
even if embalming was well established at this point, there
is always the possibility that one guy got it wrong. Now, Yeah,
like I know, in North America, it's a compareative recent thing,
like a nineteenth century thing, not a so yeah. Yeah.
(05:07):
But still there's also the factor that, right, we are
getting these accounts. This came up in that Sackville West biography,
and so we're getting that account translated, and I also
have that thing of like has anybody gone back to
retranslate it, or even are there things that the best
translator might not get because there's some nuance in the
(05:31):
wording that we that is completely out of practice now
that nobody that wasn't even very popular to begin with,
like some turn a phrase, so don't I don't know.
That's why I didn't want to include it. One because yuck,
and two because I feel like there's some mystery as
to whether or not it's true. But it's it's a
funny thing to think about that. Even on the way out,
(05:52):
she kind of flipped the bird to the mark. Uh nope.
So two things. The first thing is what you were
saying about like very old documents being translated. It reminded
me a little bit of these annotated editions of Jane
Austen's novels that I have, where it really is like
(06:13):
the page of the novel on one page and the
facing page and all annotations on it, and how much
of that is just explaining things that is not not
terminology we use now, not how we think about things now,
stuff like that, where like it would be like that
furnishings meant furniture like that one came up several times
(06:36):
reason I remember it. But when there was one of
the things that we were reading that was a quote
from her, and I stumbled over it and you were like,
I don't know what that means. And I had a
moment where it reminded me of that, of like reading
through all of these annotations that just explained things that
just aren't things that we say or do now so much.
The other thing is I was reading the outline for
(06:58):
this episode when you sent me out, when you sent
it over to me, and I got to the part
where it said Victoria Sackville West, and I was like, oh,
that's funny. Is she related to Vita Sackville West? Because
it had just never occurred to me that her full
first name was Victoria. Yeah, Like I have never heard
(07:24):
her referred to as anything. I've admittedly, like never read
a full complete biography of her or anything, but like,
I have always heard her referred to as Vita Sackville West.
So I just immediately assumed that this Victoria was some
other person. She was not one and the same. Yes, listen,
I'm always gonna say Victoria because I love it.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
Yeah, oh, Anne, Marie Louise, Yeah, I really, I mean
I said it to you during one of our breaks,
but I really marvel at her being actively engaged in battle.
Speaker 1 (08:03):
Yeah, and I likened it too. You know, if if
somebody like Paris Hilton was like, yeah, I'm gonna get
involved in active combat, you'd be like, what it was
that sort of unusual. And there are a lot of
interesting paintings of her that kind of borrow from that
(08:26):
Amazon nickname. She was apparently a very big personality and
people liked being around her, whether she liked being around
them or not. That I do also find it really
interesting that someone that was so central to life at
(08:47):
court and seemed to love it was suddenly like let's
run away and not be part of this at all.
But that's also, you know, kind of the beginning of
that trend that happened by the time we get to
Louis the sixteenth, like where you know, like Marie Antoinette
got really into Russou and was like, let's live out
in nature and had a tiny farm built for herself.
(09:10):
Those are connected ideas, they're just yeah, they're a little
ways apart on the timeline, but like they're in the
same vein of trend in the royalty. Yeah, I don't,
I don't. I don't want a farm. I mean, farms
are neat to visit. But I can't imagine me like,
let's go live in the middle of nowhere. We'll put
(09:33):
some hermit holes in the forest. And also, to me,
it's one of those things that just seems like the
indulgent fantasy of a privileged mind, right, Like the more
appealing thing to me would be like kind of like
a neighborhood. Yeah, but more like the houses are arranged
(09:56):
around like a central common area. Yeah, and all of
my friends live in them, and so I can just
like walk next door to my friend's house and in
the summertime we can all, you know, hang out in
the nice weather, cook some food, and not have to
do this situation where it's like I got to drive
(10:18):
twenty minutes or take an hour on the train to go,
yeah see a friend. Yeah, that's really the options. Twenty
minutes in the car an hour on the train, right.
I always say that if I magically were to like
win the lottery, yeah, I would just make offers to
all of our neighbors, yeah, to buy their houses. So
(10:41):
one is obviously for like shoes, shoe house, and you know,
the various things I have purchased too much of and
need more space for. But that others we would fix
up to be like, you know, anybody who needs a
place to live can hang right, just maybe put a
roller rink in one of them. That's one of the
(11:01):
that's one of my big things lately to think.
Speaker 3 (11:03):
About, right, come on, lottery.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
He talked about Harrison Dyer. This week we did we're
recording other episodes after this one that are coming out
next week. And I have said this is accidental drama
week because there's so much drama in this episode and
then there's so much drama that's a little sneak preview
also accidental but high faith theme, oh yeah, yeah, random,
(11:41):
And I didn't go into that very much here. There's
so much I didn't go into. I don't either in
the upcoming ones. And I this this may sound frightening initially,
but I feel like I understand Harrison Dyer on one level,
yeah right, because he is clearly compulsive. Like you know,
(12:03):
Mark Epstein kind of lays out the case in his
book that like if you look at the way he
did all of his work, like the way he kept
his notes, the way he lived his life in all
other ways. He had compulsion issues. Right, he never did
anything by half measure. He had to have all of
the insects specimens. Yet and I totally get that. I
have that that same drive to like I wanted to
(12:26):
dig to the center of the earth as a kid,
I tried to cordon off the playground sandbox so that
people would not mess up my project. I understand. I
understand all of that. I understand. I listen. I have
a shoe problem, I have a fabric problem, I have
all of the collecting of things problems. I get compulsion.
But where I'm like, wait a minute, is that like
(12:49):
then to kind of make that into like a tool
of cruelty is very weird to me. Sure, And That's
where I'm like, dude, you could have just been a
fun cook instead of a jerk and we would have
loved you. And who made up a whole person in
(13:10):
order to be a big a mess in order to
be a big a miss? And there are some interesting
theories about his bigamy. One thing that came up that
I thought was really really interesting was in that Nevada
Supreme court case where they heard the appeal of Wileska's
divorce is there's nurse testimony where they have the nurse
(13:33):
who delivered or was present at the hospital where they
delivered several of Wileska's kids. I don't know if it
was all three or just one or two, but she
was like, oh, you know, I thought it was odd
that this other guy was there and that he would
lie down in bed with her at the hospital. And
I'm like, what, there's like an element of it where
(13:55):
they're they're both so cloak and daggery and so brazen
about the whole thing that I'm like, this is just bananas. Yeah,
And the idea that like, she tied up so much
valuable time in the legal system trying to divorce her
imaginary friend because she accidentally had a paper trayl of
(14:19):
that imaginary friend that she had to get rid of
to marry the guy she actually wanted to be married
to who was her imaginary friend. Like, it's just it's
very Yeah, it's a lot. There's a whole lot. And
that's not even the tunnels. No, I mean I find
that whole part way more interesting than the tunnels. Actually, obviously,
I just find the tunnel part scary because the idea
(14:44):
that he was I mean, it does seem like some
of his neighbors knew about it at least at one point. Yeah.
I kind of think if I had been a neighbor,
I might have raised the alarm of being like, hey,
this guy's tunneling big giant tunnels and my house is
going to be struck really unsound. Well, I will say this.
Here are my two thoughts on why nobody raised a
(15:05):
stink Okay, even though he was not an engineer. I
think because he was respected as an intellectual, they thought like,
he knows what he's doing. And also, I don't think
they realized how extensive. They weren't sure. I think they
just thought like that guy just loves to dig. I
don't know, he's just moving dirt around down there. Yeah,
(15:28):
I bet they did not realize how far it went.
That also seems to be the case with the person
tunneling on TikTok. I have not been into the tunnel
TikTok very much, but it digbors are mad about it.
Her neighbors are mad about it, for sure. But it
also seems like the projects she initially started of I'm
(15:48):
gonna make like a sort of bunker slash shelter expanded
into something much much bigger, and like that was when
it really became a problem for the neighbors. That's at
least my cursory understanding of having not gone down that
rabbit hole on the TikTok because it stresses me out. Yeah,
(16:10):
that's more or less my take on it as well.
And I too have not gone deep into it because
I'm just like, ugh, I can't with that level of drama.
Here is an interesting thing that ties some of this
weird bigamy issue together in a strange way. There's still okay,
we're making a constellation of data points here that I'm like, huh.
(16:34):
Five days after Zella and Harrison got married, Harrison's sister
Pearl got married to a man named Siguard Adolphus Knop.
Was this a real person, Yes, to a real person
who was a doctor and a eugenicist. Oh dear, Oh,
(16:55):
so I'm surprising to have eugenics at this point in history.
And there have been some efforts at trying to understand
Harrison's behavior in this double life, and eugenics plays a
part in it because there are two big chunks of
(17:19):
material where a lot of information that we have about
him in terms of availability to present day come from.
And one is a series of articles that came out
in The Washington Post in twenty twelve written by John
Kelly where he kind of lays out the whole story.
And then we have Epstein's book, and both of them
(17:43):
mentioned that it seems as though Harrison was himself a
eugenicist who believed his genetics were superior, oh dear, and
that this may have been both the real catalyst for
his conflicts with Zella, because she was not and also
(18:05):
she ended up having hearing loss that she thought was genetic,
and so that is why she did not want to
have more children, and thus he went, well, I got
to have more children with someone, oh dear, and that
that may have been his It's a little bit tricky, right,
because I don't want anyone to think like that justifies it,
(18:28):
or we're trying to say that that explains it, but
it is an explainer of his behavior, which is still bad. Right.
And there's also this thing that comes up periodically, and
I'm like, this gets real squirrely of people wanting to
(18:52):
kind of carefully suggest that Zella had stopped having sex
with him, and that that's why he was driven to
another woman. I have very strong feelings about this, which
are like, cool, if that relationship is a worker for
you anymore, get out of it and then go find
what makes you happy. But don't this degree of concoction
(19:16):
of a completely fake thing and very purposely lying right unacceptable? Yeah,
it's super duper weird to me, and it's so yuckis
I don't?
Speaker 2 (19:30):
So?
Speaker 1 (19:30):
Yeah, he he's a monster. He also in Being a
Jerk would we mentioned a little bit of his his
fiction writing which we didn't get into deeply, that he did,
and which he included sometimes in the publication Reality and
(19:54):
he would do these really really it's almost like you know,
self in assertion friend fiction that he would do in
some of these stories, because a lot of his stories
were clearly about things that were part of his life,
like like having two families, like having But he did
one after he went after miss Mitchell for her book
(20:19):
and she sued him. He later wrote a short story
called The Taming of a Suffragette in which she is
clearly a character in it that is very thinly veiled
that of course becomes like you know, not the hero
of the piece, that's for sure. This is another accidental
theme between today. I like this episode on Dire and
(20:40):
like our next week episodes. I feel like people are
gonna start guessing in the listener mail of what next
week's episodes are because next week's episodes also have a
number of purported works of fiction that were like thinly
veiled autobiography. Yeah, yeah, I have such a list. I
don't want to hit everything. You're probably wondering, or if
(21:01):
you haven't, maybe you will now what happened to those tunnels? Well, yeah,
that's a great question. His old neighborhood still structurally unsound.
The tunnels at fifteen twelve twenty First Street got left
there for a while. One of the sets of tunnels
(21:22):
I think that second house on B Street got sold
to the government, and well LESCA thought they were using
it to like the tunnels to grow mushrooms as like
part of a scientific experiment. And then later there was
actually some discussion of and I think even legislation introduced
of like hey, we got these perfectly good tunnels under Washington,
(21:43):
d C. Why don't we use them as like raid shelters,
Like why don't we fortify them and actually make them
into spaces that can have public benefit. And a survey
was done and it was determined they aren't really big
enough to work that way, even though they're pretty big,
like just in terms of like the narrowness of spaces
and putting people in cramp spaces in an emergency that
(22:03):
was not really viable. And then the Big tunnel, apparently
in nineteen fifty eight, started to collapse. And one of
the things that's interesting, this is kind of the end
of Epstein's book, is when he mentions that there's this
kind of interesting timing where as that tunnel was starting
(22:24):
to collapse and Dyer's name came up in the news again,
his kids from each of his family visited that tunnel
like as a like, okay, here's what my dad did,
and like that's the one thing that brought them sort
of together. They didn't seem to interact or anything. It
was like one was there at one point in the
day and okay, and I'm just like, this is the
weirdest this is the weirdest code, to the weirdest story,
(22:45):
to the weirdest behavior. Yeah, there is a really fun
note that I want to end his story on because
it's not about him at all, Okay, it is about
his collaborator, JB. Smith, who worked a lot in this
as well, his fellow entomologist. And I mean when I
say these two men went at it like there are
(23:09):
if you wanted to do just an episode on scientific
argument m we could easily do it and read their
correspondence back and forth and things that they wrote to
other people about each other, and things they put in
journals about each other and like. But someone at some
point had kind of pointedly asked JB. Smith, like, why
do you still work with this man if you clearly
(23:29):
have so many problems? And his response was, I am
more interested in mosquitoes than in quarreling, okay. And I'm like,
that is probably the best attitude anyone could have in
dealing with someone like Harrison Dyer, I agree, who clearly
loved to quarrel, loved it, and loved to make his
(23:51):
life complicated. I imagine him down there digging, being like, man,
what did I do? I'm really in it, Like I
got two families to support, I got a lot of problems,
and I made them all myself. I don't know compulsion.
I get the cruelty not so much. Right. If this
(24:14):
is your weekend coming up, we hope you don't have
to deal with anybody quarrelsome complicated, or in any way
possibly passing themselves off as a fictional person. If you
have to work or have other responsibilities that don't give
you this time off, I still hope you don't have
to deal with any of that, and I hope you
(24:34):
get some time for yourself. We will be right back
here tomorrow with a classic episode, and then again on
Monday with something brand new. Stuff you missed in History
Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
(24:55):
to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Tracy V. Wilson
Holly Frey
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