April 1, 2024 • 21 mins
Welcome to the first captivating episode of Beggar's Belief, the podcast of hoaxes, pranks, scams, shams and charlatans. The home of stories that are beyond belief because someone is lying. Join hosts Mellie and Chris as they take you back to the year 1921, located in the quaint town of Hammond, Indiana, where an uncanny story revolving around a couple named Frank and Hazel McNally unfolds.
After their marriage, the townsfolk are taken aback when Hazel gives birth to twins, Lauren and Laurene. However, the neighborhood joy soon transforms into bewilderment and apprehension as queries about the infants' wellbeing and Hazel's overprotective behavior lead to unsettling revelations. Tune in as we dissect this perplexing tale that is stranger than any fictitious narrative. Mellie and Chris add their distinctive humor and sharp commentary to this offbeat story, promising an engrossing listen.
Unravel a richly woven tale of calculated deceit, hidden domestic violence, and conforming societal norms which feels like a storyline out of a dark comedy movie, but is actually a little-known slice of history.
Music by Roger A. Martinez
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
I'm Mellie. And I'm Chris. And this is Beggar's Belief.
Hux's pranks, scam shams, and charlatans. Stories that are beyond belief because someone is lying.
And it might be Mel. No. No. I always tell the truth.
Does it mean it's me? Yes. All right. It's the cat. Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Music.
(00:46):
So what we're going to do, and
I'm telling you this as much as anyone else because this is episode one,
is I'm going to put you in media res into this situation where someone is telling
a lie. Okay. Making a hoax. All right.
And you're going to have to guess what you think the actual hoax situation is.
(01:07):
Okay. I'm still on Twitter. This is how I get most of my notes.
Okay, that's fine. Yeah, great.
So, I want to pretend you're living in the small town of Hammond, Indiana.
It's southeast of Chicago, if you follow the tip of the Michigan Lake. The year is 1921.
Put yourself into mindset. Talking movies are still years away,
but you can enjoy Valentino in The Sheik or Chaplin in The Kid.
(01:32):
The most popular song on the radio is the Wang Wang Blues.
All right, that's not leaving my head. We will listen to it afterward.
It is the most 1920s song ever.
At the time, Hammond City has about 36,000 residents, so it's not huge, but a respectable city.
And you know a fair number of people around town, and you recognize the name
Frank McDowley when you spot it in the local paper.
(01:55):
He's a local guy, middle-aged, divorced,
but his name appears in a wedding announcement, so he got remarried.
Good for him yeah good for him somebody's getting some wine yeah and hopefully
the blues do come later actually i know the story yeah so the other or the other
story comes later so actually this works because almost exactly nine year months
later in december there's a birth announcement,
(02:17):
so yeah yeah yeah frankness with
new bride have had twins wang wang
yeah yeah honeymoon babies right honeymoon babies
it's the twins wang and wang then you see frank's paper
new name in the the paper one more time and it's because
he's accusing his wife of murdering the twins what
yeah that escalated quickly what so
(02:40):
that story is not what it seems what part of that would you think is not reality
the fact that these people are like vibing out to the wang wang blues and there's
murder happening like how could you want to commit any act of violence when
your number of one chart topper is Wang Wang Blues. There you go. Like one. Yeah.
(03:01):
Okay, hold on. Detective mode. The twins is a lie.
Maybe the Wang Wang Blues are a lie. Oh, oh, hmm, hmm. Yeah,
yeah, you never know. No, don't take that from me. No, no, no,
no. So let's actually go back a bit. Uh-huh.
Frank, again, divorcee with two children from his previous marriage.
Middle age, but his age reporting is a bit muddled. but the only thing that
(03:24):
all the reports agree on is that frank really really really wanted more kids
especially a son okay i can find nothing else about this guy i can't i couldn't
find an obituary i couldn't find what he did for a living so as far as we know he's still out there,
no i actually do know he's dead okay but yeah very little to exist so he set
(03:46):
out finding wife who ended up being Hazel.
Some reports say that they met through an advertisement. Some reports say that
she was his housekeeper.
Maybe he advertised for a housekeeper and ended up marrying her. I don't know.
Hazel was also divorced, 26, and had an adopted son named Raymond from a previous marriage.
These three children, none of them seem to have lived with the McNells.
(04:10):
So we're not really dealing with parents of the year here. Okay.
They vary with one exception.
They don't come up again in the story. They're really not mentioned in any other news reports.
They just kind of evaporate into the east.
So, like I said, everyone knew Frank wanted kids. It's his only defining trait.
And it seems Hazel was keen on giving them to him.
Some would show that she insisted on giving birth unassisted.
(04:35):
Well, I mean, it is the 1920s, so. Just solo the experience. Yeah. Hardcore.
Clean up your own mess. Bring them on. wow, this birth is souls-like.
So, represented in fraternal twins, one girl, one boy.
And she probably shouldn't have done the whole hardcore alone in a room giving
(04:55):
birth thing because the kids were born with huge amounts of health problems.
She and Frank named the babies Lauren and Laureen.
Lauren and Laureen. Yes. Okay. That sounds like a subreddit of bad names.
Won't get confusing at all, yes. Yes. But there's those health problems I mentioned earlier.
The babies had a skin condition and weak eyes. Weak eyes? Yes. Weak eyes.
(05:21):
Hazel's cure that they should never, ever see the sunlight.
Okay. Go on. Nose fraud too. Hadn't been come out yet, but I'm picturing that scene at the end.
Yeah. But it's very much the others, like, you know, shrouded windows kind of. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
So every day, Frank and Hazel would go out pushing around a stroller that was
(05:42):
completely covered by blankets and otherwise never took them out.
Hazel was the only one who would handle these kids. She freaked out if anyone
else was, like, even suggested taking care of them.
The neighbors were obviously distressed by this. You have this age-different
couple with these chronically ill babies who are being quarantined.
The only person who ever seemed to go in was a nurse that they hired by the
(06:05):
name of Mary Griffin. Hazel wouldn't even let her handle the kids.
So would the nurse just show up and be like, yep, still got kids?
Apparently. And go home with a paycheck? Yeah. Like, okay. Yep. Yep.
There was definite failure to thrive situation going on.
The gossip, there was a lot of concern. The baby should be babbling,
(06:25):
crawling, and instead they have no energy in their stroller.
They're just very poor health kids. They just needed more enrichment in their
dark enclosure. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
Sit in the darkened box. It's, I mean, even the Skinner box experiment was dark.
What's in the box? My kids. Plus, relationship between mother and father,
apparently really abusive.
(06:47):
Hazel threw things. Not always right in the household.
So finally, one neighbor by the age Agnes Schmerner.
Agnes Schmerner. Came over to visit Frank while Hazel was away.
Well, hello there. I'm just checking in on your kids.
How's the kids doing these days? I haven't seen your little stroller cave in
a while there. I just want to make sure you're okay.
(07:09):
So the babies are sleeping. while she's visiting and
curiosity gets the better of her she sneaks
in oh no pulls back the blankets and found
two porcelain dolls oh well
i mean technically those probably shouldn't be
in the sun that long so they weren't wrong about that and also they're fragile
(07:31):
so i wouldn't want anyone else touching them either but i wouldn't really say
they have health problems no no no so i know I know that this is probably not
your biggest question at the Mutt poem, but the brand of the dolls.
Actually, it was. I was going next. They were the F&B Baby Dolls. F&B Baby Dolls. Okay.
I spent way too long trying to figure this out because it's spelled E-F-F-A-N-B-E-E.
(07:56):
And I was thinking, is that Italian or French or stuff?
But it was actually the initials of the maker, literally F and B.
Okay. Okay. So anyway. So Agnes, Agnes obviously freaks out by this and goes to Frank.
Frank, in turn, says he knows what happened. Hazel had gone solo with the baby's
two specialists in Chicago to have them treated for medical conditions.
(08:20):
And obviously, while she was gone, she murdered the twins and replaced them
with these two baby dolls. Hazel is arrested.
Okay. 1921 is a wild time. Compared to some of the stories that we're going
to be covering later, that's nothing. I didn't say it's the wildest.
No one's being accused of witchcraft. Well, not yet.
(08:43):
So Hazel actually had another story after being arrested.
She said she never had babies. In fact, she couldn't have them.
The dolls were just her best attempt to fulfill Frank's desire for children.
Frank disagreed, saying that no, he definitely had two human children named
Lauren and Laureen, and Hazel had killed them.
(09:05):
So Hazel stood trial in October of 1922. It's at this point her story changes slightly.
Okay. In court, she states that not only were there no twins,
but Frank had known that the babies were dolls all along.
See, I know that the year 2024 is not great for mental health support services.
(09:26):
But I know a hundred years ago it was even worse.
So yikes. Not only that, this whole thing, his idea, according to Hazel.
She stated, and I quote, His desire to pose before the world as a father became
so acute, I agreed that I would hint to the neighbors that I was about to become a mother.
Hazel claimed that Frank had just changed his story to claim that he didn't
(09:49):
know what was going on to save face when the hoax was outed.
Hazel almost shamed her husband for it, ripping into his masculinity by saying
that he enjoyed playing with baby dolls.
Oh, yikes. No, honestly, that's the headline that, like, crushed the papers
in 1921. It did, unfortunately. Oh, there it is. All right.
People should have just been more frank about it. She said she hadn't enjoyed
(10:10):
keeping up the hoax, especially with the concerned neighbors.
Again, quoting, she said it was a terrible bother. I was living in a neighborhood
with a lot of old married women, and they insisted on advising me as to the
care of my children to make them grow.
They couldn't understand why they remained the same size.
You're a kid looking a little low on the small side there. Are you feeding them
(10:31):
the vegetables? Slightly hurt to the touch.
Frank, however, held to the story of murder and replacement.
A doctor was brought in who had examined Hazel in her pregnancy.
But this is 1921, and the first pregnancy tests were years away,
and they involved injecting pee into a rabbit.
(10:51):
It all right i don't know if you knew that
i know now i now have that information almost
a decade off all right at the time you just like looked at
a woman really close it was
advanced guessing with a degree i mean honestly some medical science still is
so it's not okay okay the nurse mary griffin griffith excuse me she took the
(11:14):
stand and said she never really saw the babies the whole whole time she was
there being a nurse. Again?
Sure. Yeah, well, I think you've got kids, paychecks, and go home.
Might be time to give that number one nurse comfy mug back.
To quote, I frequently saw her nurse them, or at least she appeared to at least.
(11:37):
And Mary was really pissed if she had been fooled.
I read that she had sat with Hazel for nine days while she pretended to care for dolls.
At what point do you go, these are the quietest, most well-behaved children,
tiny little babies I've ever been around.
You're raising them so right, actually. I couldn't find this in any like contemporary
(12:01):
thing, but in later things, people
were saying that she had a recording of baby dolls crying and stuff.
But that was like accounts written much later.
So I don't know what to make of that. And especially like 1921,
having a recording of baby dolls crying.
It's like, let me go put on the record player for your favorite song.
This is the Wang Wang Blues.
(12:23):
And it's just screaming and crying. Sorry, you can't hear the music for the children.
So the defense fired back with its own medical testimony, saying they planned
to bring in the doctor, W.W.
Kelly, who had performed Hazel's hysterectomy years before the marriage,
(12:45):
and that Frank had known that Hazel was unable to have kids all alone.
Having had a hysterectomy, I can tell you that, like, you need a uterus to carry a baby.
You can't just stick a baby in wherever you want like a king cake.
You sure? Pretty sure. Mardi Gras. How many you get Mardi Gras,
Mel? It was all about the beads. Okay, fair enough.
(13:10):
So, Hazel's comment on Stand. I didn't know what he was going to do. I didn't care.
I only wanted to get away from him and his dolls. So I was arrested for assault
when I bashed him over the head with a mop and later for murder.
But now I am free, and the joke is still on Mr. McNally.
But really, he had all sorts of fun out of it. He rocked the babies,
wheeled them around in the baby buggy.
(13:30):
What more could a man of his age want than doll babies?
I could probably name a few things, but everybody has their joys, and I'm not gonna...
I'm gonna touch on this one, though. That was her quote, not mine.
The press is eating this up, right? Articles ended up in the New York Times.
(13:51):
Nobody could decide quite what was going on, what was the hoax, what wasn't.
And the coverage is weird because the punchline to all the coverage is,
haha, Frank was the victim of domestic abuse.
I mean, things sucked at the time. Yeah.
There was also a sort of pearl clutching response that other women might fake
having babies as well in order to shirk their duties as mothers. Of course. Yeah.
(14:14):
1920s, there was a whole lot of negative.
Yeah.
You know who was thrilled, though? Knew exactly how to respond.
The F&B company. Of course! This is great marketing!
Oh, they loved it! One of their ads read, when they are produced so close to
life that they fool the father and the neighbors, that's going some! That's going some!
(14:40):
And I have to say, for a while, this whole thing screwed up my algorithm online
so badly that I just was getting ads for vintage F&B dolls.
Dolls my favorite was a doll from the era with a
fixed cracked head and it was on a ebay for
eleven thousand dollars because they said it was haunted of course
because the ghost gets into the crack and then we sealed it in
there yeah okay this wasn't even like the the doll that people thought was a
(15:06):
person this was just this one looks creepy obviously it's haunted so judge henry
c cleveland was as aghast as anybody about this before he could try a murder
he had to first to find out that there was ever living beings.
And the prosecution struggled with this.
Frank finally admitted on cross-examination that in the year of his children's
lives, he had never ever seen their faces.
(15:30):
And they couldn't find anyone else who said that they had either.
So the case is dropped for a lack of corpus delecti before the defense could
even call a single witness.
There's zero evidence that the twins ever existed. The body of evidence is lacking,
Yes. Is what I'm hearing. Yes.
One witness who never took the stand was the mother of Hazel's good friend,
(15:52):
childhood friend, excuse me, Renee Kahn.
Her testimony was going to be that Hazel had actually done this stunt before,
faking a pregnancy and turning up with dolls when she was 16.
Uh-huh. Yeah. Frank himself held that his children had been murdered until his
death a year later in 1923.
All right. So, as Hazel left court, reporters asked what she planned to do with
(16:15):
her life. And her goals were simple.
Divorce Frank, go to law school, and buy two replacement F&B dolls.
Hashtag non-spawn. No, no, wait. Wait. If you want to sponsor us.
No, no, no. F&B unfortunately closed years ago.
If this somehow slips through a time crack and a haunted doll's head and makes its way back to 1923,
(16:41):
on some wonderful radio program and you want to sponsor us in the future buy
us war bonds we will cash them when this airs thank you that's something i i
accept this yes all right yes she was uh photographed with the new dolls and
went on to live an unremarkable life.
Unremarkable so three big questions were there actually twins yes.
(17:05):
I believe there were twin dolls. Yeah, I don't think there were humans.
And especially, like, Frank being the, from what I'm gathering,
type of human being he was at the time, especially a man, 1920,
older, would never, ever completely admit to something like this.
(17:27):
Like, that's more than tarnished. Well, that's the second question.
If there were always dolls, how in on this was Frank? I am fairly on this fence
that, like, on the other side of the fence, actually, that Frank was in on this.
Like, Frank would have had to, like.
I venture towards that except for the fact that he hired a nurse.
See, I just think, though, it's just more to keep the illusion going.
(17:48):
If you're going that deep, why not go further?
If people in the neighborhood see a nurse coming and going, like a wet nurse,
somebody, it's like, oh, these children, like, they're so not well.
But they're trying so hard as parents to give them good care.
Yeah. Just doubling down on that illusion.
But also, again, just back to my thing earlier.
These children, as far as we're concerned, never made a sound, never made a peep.
(18:11):
Just Frank was a child once. Frank has other children.
Isn't this odd, Frank, that you suddenly... He has other children who apparently
just disappeared in the very beginning of the story.
Yeah. I don't know. Maybe the company had a recall on those dolls. Like, I don't know.
But that's... Yeah, no, I think Frank was in on this. Okay. Big time.
(18:33):
The third question was what is the or what was their long term goal?
And I actually think I might have figured out kind of what that idea was.
There were advertisements placed in newspapers that they thought came from McNally's
that they were looking to adopt a baby.
In the 1920s adoption was like this
very informal affair i think and
(18:55):
hazel actually was quoted by a neighbor saying you can't find a baby when you
need it so i think the idea was let's swap it out when we adopt a baby we just
suddenly have this baby if it's a boy we say that laurine died if As a girl, we say larned.
Oh, my gosh. The ultimate insurance policy.
(19:18):
Exactly. And then they could pass it off as a biological child because there's
also a lot of stigma going around about adoptions.
But I think that it was they were either unable to find a baby completely,
the scheme fell apart, they got too wrapped up in it, too close to it,
people were being too nosy, whatever. It didn't work out that way.
I don't have any proof for that, but my reading of the material,
(19:40):
I really think that's what happened. Yeah, no, that checks out.
Yeah, no, I follow that logic, which is disgusting and terrifying and awful.
And again, I don't like most people.
That's why I'm behind the microphone, but that's just terrible.
But again, especially like, I don't know, I just also hate the fact,
(20:02):
especially that I thoroughly believe that Frank was very much so in on this
from the beginning, masterminding it.
And Hazel, being a woman in the 1920s, was most likely seen as hysterical, off her rocker.
So Frank was, in the news, Frank was very much seen as this like brow-beaten little boy.
(20:24):
And Hazel was seen as this kind of boss babe figure. But then it's like,
she talks about breaking broomsticks over his head and throwing stuff at him.
Like, it was an incredibly violent household from all accounts.
Honestly, I'm shocked the doll survived.
They're made of porcelain. Those blankets over top of him really protected them. Yeah, yeah.
(20:46):
But yeah, that is a story. It keeps the story straight or it gets the doll again.
Yes, honey! but that is
the story of frank and hazel mcnally and their
two not children i love
that it's only gonna get weirder from here oh yeah yeah that was just a lesser
known one that i had tripped over like years ago that i've wanted to flesh out
(21:09):
and this was my excuse to go through a whole lot of old newspapers i'm so glad
you did because now this just lives rent free in my head with all All the other useless,
horrifying knowledge that rumbles around up there sometimes.
And some night at 2.57 a.m., I'm going to sit awake in my bed and go, porcelain twins.
And my spouse is going to have no idea what's going on. Yeah,
(21:32):
yeah. It's going to be hilarious. And it's better without context.
And I'm just going to go back to sleep. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Going to be out there at the antique stores looking for F&B dolls. Hmm. Hmm.
There's the Patreon idea. Yeah, yeah. Merchandise, Mal.
Merchandise okay we're not we aren't going to
to go for the haunted ones though they're just
(21:54):
too expensive they're going to be totally ghost free or
we could put the ghosts into them ourselves and have organic hauntings or
or we had a lovely audience find a haunted one for us you're assuming we're
going to have an audience this is episode one wendy's listening yeah that's
true the cat the cat has the cat is half asleep the cat isn't even listening
(22:15):
but not completely okay there you to get. Dang it.
So that was my first script. You want to sign off? Yeah.
What are we calling it again? Beggar's Belief. Oh my goodness. Like, hyper-focused.
I was just like, oh yeah, we're recording.
(22:38):
So anyway, that's been Beggar's Belief.
And take it from my side of the mic, don't believe everything you hear.
Music.
I'm Mellie. And I'm Chris. And this is Beggar's Belief.
Hux's pranks, scam shams, and charlatans. Stories that are beyond belief because someone is lying.
And it might be Mel. No. No. I always tell the truth.
Does it mean it's me? Yes. All right. It's the cat. Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Music.
(00:46):
So what we're going to do, and
I'm telling you this as much as anyone else because this is episode one,
is I'm going to put you in media res into this situation where someone is telling
a lie. Okay. Making a hoax. All right.
And you're going to have to guess what you think the actual hoax situation is.
(01:07):
Okay. I'm still on Twitter. This is how I get most of my notes.
Okay, that's fine. Yeah, great.
So, I want to pretend you're living in the small town of Hammond, Indiana.
It's southeast of Chicago, if you follow the tip of the Michigan Lake. The year is 1921.
Put yourself into mindset. Talking movies are still years away,
but you can enjoy Valentino in The Sheik or Chaplin in The Kid.
(01:32):
The most popular song on the radio is the Wang Wang Blues.
All right, that's not leaving my head. We will listen to it afterward.
It is the most 1920s song ever.
At the time, Hammond City has about 36,000 residents, so it's not huge, but a respectable city.
And you know a fair number of people around town, and you recognize the name
Frank McDowley when you spot it in the local paper.
(01:55):
He's a local guy, middle-aged, divorced,
but his name appears in a wedding announcement, so he got remarried.
Good for him yeah good for him somebody's getting some wine yeah and hopefully
the blues do come later actually i know the story yeah so the other or the other
story comes later so actually this works because almost exactly nine year months
later in december there's a birth announcement,
(02:17):
so yeah yeah yeah frankness with
new bride have had twins wang wang
yeah yeah honeymoon babies right honeymoon babies
it's the twins wang and wang then you see frank's paper
new name in the the paper one more time and it's because
he's accusing his wife of murdering the twins what
yeah that escalated quickly what so
(02:40):
that story is not what it seems what part of that would you think is not reality
the fact that these people are like vibing out to the wang wang blues and there's
murder happening like how could you want to commit any act of violence when
your number of one chart topper is Wang Wang Blues. There you go. Like one. Yeah.
(03:01):
Okay, hold on. Detective mode. The twins is a lie.
Maybe the Wang Wang Blues are a lie. Oh, oh, hmm, hmm. Yeah,
yeah, you never know. No, don't take that from me. No, no, no,
no. So let's actually go back a bit. Uh-huh.
Frank, again, divorcee with two children from his previous marriage.
Middle age, but his age reporting is a bit muddled. but the only thing that
(03:24):
all the reports agree on is that frank really really really wanted more kids
especially a son okay i can find nothing else about this guy i can't i couldn't
find an obituary i couldn't find what he did for a living so as far as we know he's still out there,
no i actually do know he's dead okay but yeah very little to exist so he set
(03:46):
out finding wife who ended up being Hazel.
Some reports say that they met through an advertisement. Some reports say that
she was his housekeeper.
Maybe he advertised for a housekeeper and ended up marrying her. I don't know.
Hazel was also divorced, 26, and had an adopted son named Raymond from a previous marriage.
These three children, none of them seem to have lived with the McNells.
(04:10):
So we're not really dealing with parents of the year here. Okay.
They vary with one exception.
They don't come up again in the story. They're really not mentioned in any other news reports.
They just kind of evaporate into the east.
So, like I said, everyone knew Frank wanted kids. It's his only defining trait.
And it seems Hazel was keen on giving them to him.
Some would show that she insisted on giving birth unassisted.
(04:35):
Well, I mean, it is the 1920s, so. Just solo the experience. Yeah. Hardcore.
Clean up your own mess. Bring them on. wow, this birth is souls-like.
So, represented in fraternal twins, one girl, one boy.
And she probably shouldn't have done the whole hardcore alone in a room giving
(04:55):
birth thing because the kids were born with huge amounts of health problems.
She and Frank named the babies Lauren and Laureen.
Lauren and Laureen. Yes. Okay. That sounds like a subreddit of bad names.
Won't get confusing at all, yes. Yes. But there's those health problems I mentioned earlier.
The babies had a skin condition and weak eyes. Weak eyes? Yes. Weak eyes.
(05:21):
Hazel's cure that they should never, ever see the sunlight.
Okay. Go on. Nose fraud too. Hadn't been come out yet, but I'm picturing that scene at the end.
Yeah. But it's very much the others, like, you know, shrouded windows kind of. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
So every day, Frank and Hazel would go out pushing around a stroller that was
(05:42):
completely covered by blankets and otherwise never took them out.
Hazel was the only one who would handle these kids. She freaked out if anyone
else was, like, even suggested taking care of them.
The neighbors were obviously distressed by this. You have this age-different
couple with these chronically ill babies who are being quarantined.
The only person who ever seemed to go in was a nurse that they hired by the
(06:05):
name of Mary Griffin. Hazel wouldn't even let her handle the kids.
So would the nurse just show up and be like, yep, still got kids?
Apparently. And go home with a paycheck? Yeah. Like, okay. Yep. Yep.
There was definite failure to thrive situation going on.
The gossip, there was a lot of concern. The baby should be babbling,
(06:25):
crawling, and instead they have no energy in their stroller.
They're just very poor health kids. They just needed more enrichment in their
dark enclosure. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
Sit in the darkened box. It's, I mean, even the Skinner box experiment was dark.
What's in the box? My kids. Plus, relationship between mother and father,
apparently really abusive.
(06:47):
Hazel threw things. Not always right in the household.
So finally, one neighbor by the age Agnes Schmerner.
Agnes Schmerner. Came over to visit Frank while Hazel was away.
Well, hello there. I'm just checking in on your kids.
How's the kids doing these days? I haven't seen your little stroller cave in
a while there. I just want to make sure you're okay.
(07:09):
So the babies are sleeping. while she's visiting and
curiosity gets the better of her she sneaks
in oh no pulls back the blankets and found
two porcelain dolls oh well
i mean technically those probably shouldn't be
in the sun that long so they weren't wrong about that and also they're fragile
(07:31):
so i wouldn't want anyone else touching them either but i wouldn't really say
they have health problems no no no so i know I know that this is probably not
your biggest question at the Mutt poem, but the brand of the dolls.
Actually, it was. I was going next. They were the F&B Baby Dolls. F&B Baby Dolls. Okay.
I spent way too long trying to figure this out because it's spelled E-F-F-A-N-B-E-E.
(07:56):
And I was thinking, is that Italian or French or stuff?
But it was actually the initials of the maker, literally F and B.
Okay. Okay. So anyway. So Agnes, Agnes obviously freaks out by this and goes to Frank.
Frank, in turn, says he knows what happened. Hazel had gone solo with the baby's
two specialists in Chicago to have them treated for medical conditions.
(08:20):
And obviously, while she was gone, she murdered the twins and replaced them
with these two baby dolls. Hazel is arrested.
Okay. 1921 is a wild time. Compared to some of the stories that we're going
to be covering later, that's nothing. I didn't say it's the wildest.
No one's being accused of witchcraft. Well, not yet.
(08:43):
So Hazel actually had another story after being arrested.
She said she never had babies. In fact, she couldn't have them.
The dolls were just her best attempt to fulfill Frank's desire for children.
Frank disagreed, saying that no, he definitely had two human children named
Lauren and Laureen, and Hazel had killed them.
(09:05):
So Hazel stood trial in October of 1922. It's at this point her story changes slightly.
Okay. In court, she states that not only were there no twins,
but Frank had known that the babies were dolls all along.
See, I know that the year 2024 is not great for mental health support services.
(09:26):
But I know a hundred years ago it was even worse.
So yikes. Not only that, this whole thing, his idea, according to Hazel.
She stated, and I quote, His desire to pose before the world as a father became
so acute, I agreed that I would hint to the neighbors that I was about to become a mother.
Hazel claimed that Frank had just changed his story to claim that he didn't
(09:49):
know what was going on to save face when the hoax was outed.
Hazel almost shamed her husband for it, ripping into his masculinity by saying
that he enjoyed playing with baby dolls.
Oh, yikes. No, honestly, that's the headline that, like, crushed the papers
in 1921. It did, unfortunately. Oh, there it is. All right.
People should have just been more frank about it. She said she hadn't enjoyed
(10:10):
keeping up the hoax, especially with the concerned neighbors.
Again, quoting, she said it was a terrible bother. I was living in a neighborhood
with a lot of old married women, and they insisted on advising me as to the
care of my children to make them grow.
They couldn't understand why they remained the same size.
You're a kid looking a little low on the small side there. Are you feeding them
(10:31):
the vegetables? Slightly hurt to the touch.
Frank, however, held to the story of murder and replacement.
A doctor was brought in who had examined Hazel in her pregnancy.
But this is 1921, and the first pregnancy tests were years away,
and they involved injecting pee into a rabbit.
(10:51):
It all right i don't know if you knew that
i know now i now have that information almost
a decade off all right at the time you just like looked at
a woman really close it was
advanced guessing with a degree i mean honestly some medical science still is
so it's not okay okay the nurse mary griffin griffith excuse me she took the
(11:14):
stand and said she never really saw the babies the whole whole time she was
there being a nurse. Again?
Sure. Yeah, well, I think you've got kids, paychecks, and go home.
Might be time to give that number one nurse comfy mug back.
To quote, I frequently saw her nurse them, or at least she appeared to at least.
(11:37):
And Mary was really pissed if she had been fooled.
I read that she had sat with Hazel for nine days while she pretended to care for dolls.
At what point do you go, these are the quietest, most well-behaved children,
tiny little babies I've ever been around.
You're raising them so right, actually. I couldn't find this in any like contemporary
(12:01):
thing, but in later things, people
were saying that she had a recording of baby dolls crying and stuff.
But that was like accounts written much later.
So I don't know what to make of that. And especially like 1921,
having a recording of baby dolls crying.
It's like, let me go put on the record player for your favorite song.
This is the Wang Wang Blues.
(12:23):
And it's just screaming and crying. Sorry, you can't hear the music for the children.
So the defense fired back with its own medical testimony, saying they planned
to bring in the doctor, W.W.
Kelly, who had performed Hazel's hysterectomy years before the marriage,
(12:45):
and that Frank had known that Hazel was unable to have kids all alone.
Having had a hysterectomy, I can tell you that, like, you need a uterus to carry a baby.
You can't just stick a baby in wherever you want like a king cake.
You sure? Pretty sure. Mardi Gras. How many you get Mardi Gras,
Mel? It was all about the beads. Okay, fair enough.
(13:10):
So, Hazel's comment on Stand. I didn't know what he was going to do. I didn't care.
I only wanted to get away from him and his dolls. So I was arrested for assault
when I bashed him over the head with a mop and later for murder.
But now I am free, and the joke is still on Mr. McNally.
But really, he had all sorts of fun out of it. He rocked the babies,
wheeled them around in the baby buggy.
(13:30):
What more could a man of his age want than doll babies?
I could probably name a few things, but everybody has their joys, and I'm not gonna...
I'm gonna touch on this one, though. That was her quote, not mine.
The press is eating this up, right? Articles ended up in the New York Times.
(13:51):
Nobody could decide quite what was going on, what was the hoax, what wasn't.
And the coverage is weird because the punchline to all the coverage is,
haha, Frank was the victim of domestic abuse.
I mean, things sucked at the time. Yeah.
There was also a sort of pearl clutching response that other women might fake
having babies as well in order to shirk their duties as mothers. Of course. Yeah.
(14:14):
1920s, there was a whole lot of negative.
Yeah.
You know who was thrilled, though? Knew exactly how to respond.
The F&B company. Of course! This is great marketing!
Oh, they loved it! One of their ads read, when they are produced so close to
life that they fool the father and the neighbors, that's going some! That's going some!
(14:40):
And I have to say, for a while, this whole thing screwed up my algorithm online
so badly that I just was getting ads for vintage F&B dolls.
Dolls my favorite was a doll from the era with a
fixed cracked head and it was on a ebay for
eleven thousand dollars because they said it was haunted of course
because the ghost gets into the crack and then we sealed it in
there yeah okay this wasn't even like the the doll that people thought was a
(15:06):
person this was just this one looks creepy obviously it's haunted so judge henry
c cleveland was as aghast as anybody about this before he could try a murder
he had to first to find out that there was ever living beings.
And the prosecution struggled with this.
Frank finally admitted on cross-examination that in the year of his children's
lives, he had never ever seen their faces.
(15:30):
And they couldn't find anyone else who said that they had either.
So the case is dropped for a lack of corpus delecti before the defense could
even call a single witness.
There's zero evidence that the twins ever existed. The body of evidence is lacking,
Yes. Is what I'm hearing. Yes.
One witness who never took the stand was the mother of Hazel's good friend,
(15:52):
childhood friend, excuse me, Renee Kahn.
Her testimony was going to be that Hazel had actually done this stunt before,
faking a pregnancy and turning up with dolls when she was 16.
Uh-huh. Yeah. Frank himself held that his children had been murdered until his
death a year later in 1923.
All right. So, as Hazel left court, reporters asked what she planned to do with
(16:15):
her life. And her goals were simple.
Divorce Frank, go to law school, and buy two replacement F&B dolls.
Hashtag non-spawn. No, no, wait. Wait. If you want to sponsor us.
No, no, no. F&B unfortunately closed years ago.
If this somehow slips through a time crack and a haunted doll's head and makes its way back to 1923,
(16:41):
on some wonderful radio program and you want to sponsor us in the future buy
us war bonds we will cash them when this airs thank you that's something i i
accept this yes all right yes she was uh photographed with the new dolls and
went on to live an unremarkable life.
Unremarkable so three big questions were there actually twins yes.
(17:05):
I believe there were twin dolls. Yeah, I don't think there were humans.
And especially, like, Frank being the, from what I'm gathering,
type of human being he was at the time, especially a man, 1920,
older, would never, ever completely admit to something like this.
(17:27):
Like, that's more than tarnished. Well, that's the second question.
If there were always dolls, how in on this was Frank? I am fairly on this fence
that, like, on the other side of the fence, actually, that Frank was in on this.
Like, Frank would have had to, like.
I venture towards that except for the fact that he hired a nurse.
See, I just think, though, it's just more to keep the illusion going.
(17:48):
If you're going that deep, why not go further?
If people in the neighborhood see a nurse coming and going, like a wet nurse,
somebody, it's like, oh, these children, like, they're so not well.
But they're trying so hard as parents to give them good care.
Yeah. Just doubling down on that illusion.
But also, again, just back to my thing earlier.
These children, as far as we're concerned, never made a sound, never made a peep.
(18:11):
Just Frank was a child once. Frank has other children.
Isn't this odd, Frank, that you suddenly... He has other children who apparently
just disappeared in the very beginning of the story.
Yeah. I don't know. Maybe the company had a recall on those dolls. Like, I don't know.
But that's... Yeah, no, I think Frank was in on this. Okay. Big time.
(18:33):
The third question was what is the or what was their long term goal?
And I actually think I might have figured out kind of what that idea was.
There were advertisements placed in newspapers that they thought came from McNally's
that they were looking to adopt a baby.
In the 1920s adoption was like this
very informal affair i think and
(18:55):
hazel actually was quoted by a neighbor saying you can't find a baby when you
need it so i think the idea was let's swap it out when we adopt a baby we just
suddenly have this baby if it's a boy we say that laurine died if As a girl, we say larned.
Oh, my gosh. The ultimate insurance policy.
(19:18):
Exactly. And then they could pass it off as a biological child because there's
also a lot of stigma going around about adoptions.
But I think that it was they were either unable to find a baby completely,
the scheme fell apart, they got too wrapped up in it, too close to it,
people were being too nosy, whatever. It didn't work out that way.
I don't have any proof for that, but my reading of the material,
(19:40):
I really think that's what happened. Yeah, no, that checks out.
Yeah, no, I follow that logic, which is disgusting and terrifying and awful.
And again, I don't like most people.
That's why I'm behind the microphone, but that's just terrible.
But again, especially like, I don't know, I just also hate the fact,
(20:02):
especially that I thoroughly believe that Frank was very much so in on this
from the beginning, masterminding it.
And Hazel, being a woman in the 1920s, was most likely seen as hysterical, off her rocker.
So Frank was, in the news, Frank was very much seen as this like brow-beaten little boy.
(20:24):
And Hazel was seen as this kind of boss babe figure. But then it's like,
she talks about breaking broomsticks over his head and throwing stuff at him.
Like, it was an incredibly violent household from all accounts.
Honestly, I'm shocked the doll survived.
They're made of porcelain. Those blankets over top of him really protected them. Yeah, yeah.
(20:46):
But yeah, that is a story. It keeps the story straight or it gets the doll again.
Yes, honey! but that is
the story of frank and hazel mcnally and their
two not children i love
that it's only gonna get weirder from here oh yeah yeah that was just a lesser
known one that i had tripped over like years ago that i've wanted to flesh out
(21:09):
and this was my excuse to go through a whole lot of old newspapers i'm so glad
you did because now this just lives rent free in my head with all All the other useless,
horrifying knowledge that rumbles around up there sometimes.
And some night at 2.57 a.m., I'm going to sit awake in my bed and go, porcelain twins.
And my spouse is going to have no idea what's going on. Yeah,
(21:32):
yeah. It's going to be hilarious. And it's better without context.
And I'm just going to go back to sleep. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Going to be out there at the antique stores looking for F&B dolls. Hmm. Hmm.
There's the Patreon idea. Yeah, yeah. Merchandise, Mal.
Merchandise okay we're not we aren't going to
to go for the haunted ones though they're just
(21:54):
too expensive they're going to be totally ghost free or
we could put the ghosts into them ourselves and have organic hauntings or
or we had a lovely audience find a haunted one for us you're assuming we're
going to have an audience this is episode one wendy's listening yeah that's
true the cat the cat has the cat is half asleep the cat isn't even listening
(22:15):
but not completely okay there you to get. Dang it.
So that was my first script. You want to sign off? Yeah.
What are we calling it again? Beggar's Belief. Oh my goodness. Like, hyper-focused.
I was just like, oh yeah, we're recording.
(22:38):
So anyway, that's been Beggar's Belief.
And take it from my side of the mic, don't believe everything you hear.
Music.
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