July Bonus Episode: Digging Into Exhumed with Aaron Mahnke

Morbid

In this bonus episode of Morbid, Aaron Mahnke discusses his new book 'Exhumed,' which explores the Mercy Brown case and the broader cultural beliefs surrounding death, disease, and the supernatural in 19th-century New En

Key takeaways

• Mahnke's 'Exhumed' began as a 12-minute Lore episode on Mercy Brown in 2015 but grew into a full book after years of collecting related stories about death rituals and folklore.

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Hey, weirdos. I'm Ash. I'm Elena. And I'm Erin. And this is morbid. A very special morbid. A special morbid. Welcome, Aaron. Thank you for having me. Thank you for coming. Weirdos. Today we have Aaron Manky on the show. You probably know him from his award-winning podcast lore or perhaps the author of some of your favorite titles. And we have exciting news. Your latest book, Exhumed, comes out August 4th. It does. So soon. So soon. Too soon. Congratulations. Thank you. Speaker 1: You're welcome. This book is amazing. I got an early copy of it. I feel very fortunate. Yeah, you're on the back. Oh, that's so cool. I didn't even know that. Right, right at the top. Oh, look at me. You're on there with Amy Bruni. Oh, hell yeah. From Kindred Spirits and Ghost Hunters and Josh Gates. Oh, shit. Cool. Good company. Good company. I feel good about that. At the very top. Oh, look at me. Look at you, Big Red. I love it. It's an amazing book. It is like lore on crack. It is so much information that is so interesting. It had like my husband started reading it and he was like, this is amazing. She loves it. Yeah. It's phenomenal. Thank you. So good. So years ago, a couple years after I started lore, I created a podcast called Unearthed. And the idea was, you know, we spend 30 minutes on a topic on lore. But what if we spend a whole season on the topic? And the first season is on the Salem Witch Trials, which, Still, people listen to like every year that I get questions about it all the time. It was 10 episodes, you know, like 45 minutes apiece. And there was so much fun in spending just all that time exploring a big complex topic. Like you can really take your time and dig deep and build the house, right? You can take your time. And we did four seasons of that. And then I halted it. But exhumed in some ways as sort of like a fifth season. Yeah. You know, it is 20 lore episodes. It feels like that. It is, yeah. That's why I loved it. It was like very homey. I was like, oh, I'm ready for this. Yeah. It's cozy. Yeah. It's like a good read for like a thunderstorm, you know? That's the vibe of it. Yeah, yeah. And I like to approach my writing style for things like this as a little bit more lighthearted. And I don't want people to get bogged down in technicality. Right. While at the same time, there is some teaching that has to go on in the book. And we can, we can explore that. Yeah. And when you say that, that is what I noticed immediately. about the writing style is it doesn't bog you down with all these like technical things, but it's giving you the information, but I felt like you were talking to me about it. Yeah. Because you have like a little aside where you'll be like, right? Like, you know what I mean? It felt very comfortable to read. And there's a few dad jokes. I apologize. I love it. You got to throw in the dad jokes where you can. Yeah. Yeah. I expect it. It's my right. Yeah. Absolutely it is. So in Exhumed, you examine the Mercy Brown case. Yes. That's not all. It also really examines like the attitudes about life and death that led up to and continued after that case. You've been asking on lore the question why for a long time. What was the thing that made you want to explore it so deeply here? Well, Mercy Brown was the very first episode of lore. So we're talking March of 2015, you know, almost 12 years ago. Yeah. I probably wrote it about 12 years ago this coming November. Oh, wow. Wow. And at the time, it was a cool, creepy story. It's really all that it was. And it's local. Hey, folks, have you ever heard of this before? Let me tell you about this, right? And, you know, and I built that episode. It was only like 12 minutes long because I was still trying to get my feet on the ground. Like, what is this format even supposed to be? So there's a little bit of vampire and premature bear. There's some safety coffin stuff in there. But it's mostly about Mercy Brown. Yeah. And when I wrote and told the story in the podcast, I thought, folks just need to hear this. wild story. But then what happened is I kept making lore. And as the years went by, I would, I would write and publish another episode and think, you know, that, that kind of, this sounds weird, that kind of smells like the Mercy Brown story. There's some aspect of it that's, it's almost like it's from the same family. I wonder why I feel like those are connected. And I like puzzles. I like, I like riddles. I grew up playing games like Myst in the 90s. Holy shit. Oh, my gosh. So it's like you have to pay attention to sounds you heard. in one scene and then you're using them as a code somewhere else. And I was just filing away certain episodes as I went through making lore and I thought, oh, this really does feel like it might have some bearing on the Mercy Brown story. And I just kind of gathered those pieces together. And at some point a couple years ago, I realized this is a book. I need to write about it. Hell yeah. And so the idea was, yes, we've got the Mercy Brown story. And I can tell it. Actually, I tell it in the very beginning, kind of in the format that people typically bump into it with errors and all. And then at the end of the book, the last 20% is really covering Mercy's story. But that first 80% of the book is all those other stories that I bumped into along the way that help explain the why, like you said. Why was it thought that what they did to her post death was an okay, acceptable thing to do? How was that a pretty? Valid question. Valid question. Why did they think, okay, let's do that, you know? Right. It really works, too, in the book, because, like you said, it begins with her and ends with her. And when you eat up all that in the middle, when you get back to her, you're like, oh, okay. Like it does mean, you're like, oh, shit, okay. This doesn't seem as crazy when you put it in the context of all this other stuff. Exactly. You know, once you talk about talking blood, it's like, that's not weird anymore. Who wouldn't want to talk about talking? There's a lot of blood in the book, actually. There is a lot of blood. I'm a metaphor guy. And I tend to tell people that, look, when we talk about context, what you're talking about, talking about is like 3D glasses at the movie theater. You know, if you watch the movie without them, it's going to look a little weird. You're not going to get the whole picture. Oh, that is a good way of But when you put the 3D glasses on, all of a sudden, like, things are moving at you and you really get a sense for what's going on. Yeah. That's what context does to a story. Yeah, absolutely. Fiction or it's a historical exploration like this. Yeah. So for me, I had to equip people so that, yes, by the time they get to that last section of the book, oh my gosh, I have all the tools. I have all the tools. on my backpack that I need to, you know, go through this mission. I can do this now. Yeah. Yeah. It lets you appreciate the story more. It does. Because you can like weirdly sympathize with other people in the story. And that was one of the surprising things about it. As I wrote it, I realized, oh, they aren't like dumb barbaric people. Yeah. Right. Because it could come off that way at first when you hear that story. Absolutely. Villagers cut open a dead woman's chest and, you know, burn her heart. Yeah, what the hell is that? It sounds barbaric. But when you actually dig into it, it's really human. Yeah, absolutely it is, which is so scary. Yeah. Now, speaking of that, the monsters and things that people believe in often tell us a lot more about people than they do about the monsters. What do you think vampires and the panic around them reveals about the fears of people in 19th century, New England? Well, they were dealing with a lot of disease. You know, at the time tuberculosis was, it had been, a thing for a very long time, but there's just something about, you know, late 19th century that TB was really just having fun out there. Everything was just gross. Living its life. Yeah. Yeah. And so there's this idea that there's this invisible thing that's robbing their loved ones from them, robbing their livelihood in some ways. It's funny, like just a few years before, maybe it was a few months before Mercy's mother died in the early 1880s, they had actually figured out what was causing TB scientifically. But that was in Europe. And it was like a world away from this farming village outside of Newport in Rhode Island. They didn't get the scientific breakthrough. They did not get that. There was no alert on their phone to follow. BBC wasn't just coming up. Yeah. So there's like this, it's like having a phone call with somebody and there's like a massive delay and they just didn't know. Even by the time Mercy passed away in early 1892, they really weren't putting the pieces together. And at the same time, even if you explain it to them, what they were being told is there's this invisible thing that is making you sick. And at the end of the day, but it also sounds a lot like what they thought a vampire was doing or the supernatural force. It is an invisible thing that is sucking the life out of them, just in a different way. Yeah. A little more scientific, you know? Yeah. That makes more sense. I feel like a vampire is way more fun. It's a lot more fun. I'd rather go at the hands of a vampire than TB. Yeah. Yeah. You know. I would have fallen victim to this whole vampire panic. Just I think I would have wanted to. For the fun of it. Like I think I would have chosen to. Yeah. Even if I was like, yeah, it's probably science. For the theater. Yeah, just for the theater of it all. Like, let's go. The historian and the writer me wants to say that like she was the end. She was the end of like a century of stories like hers. Back to the 1790s was Sarah Tilling asked. Also in Exeter Rhode Island, by the way. Oh, really? Book ended by this little village in Rhode Island. And then they were, in between, they were all over. Yeah. Vermont, New Hampshire, everywhere. And we call it the New England vampire panic, but there's not a lot of evidence that people were out there at that moment saying so-and-so is a vampire. What they were saying was one of the people in the grave who died before the sick person who is currently dying is somehow sucking the life out of people. What is that? And we know that the word vampire has a history. of like appearing on the public record. But we also like almost immediately see it being used as a metaphor. And I talk about this in the book. Like you'll see it in newspapers being used as a metaphor for politicians. Oh, yeah. For, you know, was it Oliver Wendell Holmes used the word vampire to talk about women, which was like the most sexist thing. I'm going to say rude. I hope his wife gave him hell for that. But it was being used as a metaphor and you can't have a metaphor unless people understand what the word is supposed to mean. Yeah. So there is the. assumption that it was floating around outside of print long before. But there's really no record of it was kind of imprinted on mercy's story by an outside newspaper when you first see the word vampire show up. To them it was just sort of like there's something supernatural going. Yeah, there's something sucking the life out of people. Exactly. Like a blood sucker. Yeah. Great. Or in true blood, a fanger. A fanger. Yeah. So just in the book as a whole, was there a chapter that like challenged a belief you held previously, just kind of like rocked your world a little bit when you researched it? I, that's a good question. The hardest chapter to write was probably the one that was all the philosophy about the human soul. I loved that. That must be fascinating. It did challenge a lot of like preconceived notions I had going in, which was, oh, they always assumed it was in the heart, you know, that kind of thing. And they did cut out Mercy's heart. So I'm going to find that. But what I found instead was that it was just everywhere. I was going to say so much more complicated. Different cultures had different ideas. Same cultures went through multiple ideas. Some cultures, there were multiple souls. Like in Egypt, it was, you know, at the very minimum, nine different souls that had different functions. That's wild. Yeah. So that one really, it was hard to write, too, just from a philosophical standpoint. I can explain creepy history and some science, but we get into the realm of the soul. and what is the difference between each of these nine? It's a little murky. Yes. Yeah. It takes a lot out of you. Yeah. We always say Ash has several souls. I have a lot of souls. She'll slip into an accent sometimes. We're like, was that a soul? It just happened. It might happen today. Yeah. So just know it's a soul. Yeah. So just know she's got a few. Yeah. I have to say one of my favorite chapters in the book was corpse medicine because we covered that pretty recently. Yeah. And I fell down so many different rabbit holes with that. That's so fascinating. What was the most absurd medical practice that you came across in your research? Absurd. Well, so... It's all pretty absurd. Yeah, it's all pretty absurd. I mean, we can get into blood later, but I think about the English king, was it Charles the second who had the drops that he carried with him. Oh, yeah. The king's drops. Yeah. And in the firsthand accounts of people who had consumed them and what it was doing to them, and then you realize that the two main ingredients were like, high proof alcohol and opium. They were just fucked up. They were wasted. And every time he felt like a twinge of pain, he was going for multiple drops. Just give me the whole bottle. Just drinking him out of skulls too. So no wonder it worked, right? Worked in air quotes. For a little bit. Yes, exactly. You throw enough opium in anything. Yeah. It's going to numb out. It's going to work. That'll hold you over for some time. In the end, I think he ended up dying of seizures, right? Maybe. I think he did. I don't remember. After long-term use of. I would assume. He was also a hobby alchemist. And at that time, alchemists in general tended to work a lot with mercury and like boiling it and creating vapors from it. And so they just consumed so many toxic chemicals. I mean, Isaac Newton was gray, I think, in his 30s. Wow. When some of his journals went up for auction back in the 90s, I think it was in the 90s or the 80s, they opened up one of the books and found strands of his hair in there. And they had him tested. and their mercury levels were off the charts. Oh my God. It's no wonder he couldn't eat. He had digestive issues and died young. Oh my God, Mercury will mess you up. We just talked about that at our live show. It's called the Matt, like Matt Hatter, Matt is a Hatter. That comes from them being poisoned by the vapors for Mercury. Yeah, exactly. It's crazy. That's nuts. Yeah. I think that's what happened in that podcast, Estown. Do you remember that podcast? I do remember that. Is that mercury? I don't know. It was some kind of poisoning like that. Okay. Okay. That made some shit go down. I'm actually kind of surprised that I haven't got mercury poisoning because I love sushi. You do. I'm actually surprised you've never gone. Yeah, I know. You love the sea. Fingers crossed that I don't. It's one of those things that we look back now and we say, yeah. Oh my gosh. What were you thinking? It's like a liquid metal. I know. Did you not notice people dying from that? Yeah. Right. But it's like radium too. Like in a hundred years are people going to be looking at us and saying chemotherapy, Are you kidding me? Probably. Probably. You poison the body to the point of death to kill cancer. Yeah. What were you thinking? Like, what were you thinking? Or like, hey, holding your phone 24-7? What's that? Having in your pocket next to your vital organs? Like putting it in your foot, your bed next to your face. Yeah, right. You know, they just didn't know better. You know, and we don't know. Yeah. And we don't either. The worst part is we kind of know better. I know. I know a little. Yeah. But more will come out. I'm sure. Yeah. Well, they'll find out how stupid we are later. It's just, it's the next generation's thing. Yeah. It'll be, they'll deal with it. Yeah. Now. Now, another chapter that I really loved was the Hand of Glory. Oh my gosh. I love the Hand of Glory. It's a wild concept. It's so crazy. For people who love to accessorize, I guess it's your chapter. And I do. I do. I do love it. Now, for people who are listening who are like a Hand of Glory, can you give us a little synopsis of what it is? Oh, definitely. So a Hand of Glory was a tool of folklore. Now, there's a couple different purposes with, or uses with it. But it starts with literally a human hand. Okay. Often the hand that was cut off of a thief. Yeah. And that's important because it's a, it's an example of what's known as sympathetic magic. And sympathetic magic is built on the concept of like is connected to like. There's also a branch of sympathetic magic that's like things that have touched something have passed on some of their power to things. Yes. But a good example would be most people have heard someone say eat walnuts. They're good for your brain. and then they'll point to an open walnut and say, look, it even looks like a brain, right? Yeah. So there's a lot of herbs. If you go, look through the vitamin section at a CVS or something, you'll see things like bloodwort and like a word with wart after it. And it's often named after a body part. And it's because somebody looked at the plant and said, wow, that looks a lot like the human body part. Let's name it after that. And I bet it's useful in treating that. Right. So that's sympathetic magic. It's this idea that God wrote the, the purpose of a thing into its physical appearance. So within this realm, we have the Hand of Glory. And the Hand of Glory was a hand, a human hand that was often dried, pickled. You know, they drain it of blood. They set it out in the sun. There's a whole recipe in the book, you know, quoting from somebody from a few hundred years ago. I love the recipes. You know, you hang it on your door for a while. You know, the end result. Like a bundle of flowers. Yes. It's on the door knocker. You can use it. in the meantime. And what you end up with is essentially a mummified human hand, that either wicks are attached to the fingers. I love that so much. So that you can burn the fingers as candles. Or the hand is dipped in wax and you simply light the fingers on fire themselves. Like either way. Go for it. Because of its association with theft, you had a couple of uses for a hand of glory. One is that you could, as a thief, carry one with you. And if you had it when you broke into somebody's house, no one would be able to wake up from their sleep. It was like carte blanche freedom to do whatever you wanted in their house, right? So it was like, you imagine somebody with it on a chain hanging off their hip, like I am all set. Yeah, I've got this dead hand with me. But then what could go wrong? On the other side of it, also connected to theft, people who had a home and wanted to protect themselves could have a hand of glory in the house, and that was supposed to ward off evil. Like a talisman. Yeah. Which if there's a hand hanging off your door, I'm not hitting you up. I'm not going to break into that house. Like that would make sense. That's fair. I'd be like, they mean business. Yeah. So they're not messing around. I think it makes sense. Yep. Yep. I love it. It's just, it's delightful to think that people had this. It's hanging around. Mounted human hand with some, you know, half burned fingers on them. I love that. And just imagine, I'm sorry, I have to go here. The smell. Yeah. That was not a Yankee candle. No. That's not what I look for in a candle, you know. But I think every. Everything smelled. That's true. So maybe I think it wouldn't even. Oh, yeah. Like, you'd be like, that's just another smell. Yeah, maybe the wax, like, slightly obscured the death. Maybe. Right. Yeah. You never know. Because they all smelled. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It might have improved things. It honestly. Exactly. So at least you're getting like a burning smell. You know, something. You know, something. You know, everything else. Yeah. And, you know, every version of a Hand of Glory, I feel like they have like a slightly different recipe, if you will. Yeah. Is there one historical? account of like a recipe or a hand of glory situation that made you be like that's enough research for today i think i'm going to check out through the magic of editing i am going to i'm going to look really quickly here i got this he just cut out the next 10 minutes of me flipping through i mean so chapter six is called overly sympathetic and um there's a yeah a lovely drawing of a lit hand of glory of a hand of glory. And, you know, I start off by talking about, like, why hands? Because hands were, like, this really symbolic thing in a lot of belief systems. I get that, too. Other examples. You know, like, hands, I feel like are individualistic. I'm a Gemini. So Gemini rules the hands. Oh. I didn't know that. Yeah. I always look at people's hands. I know. You are fascinated by hands. I'm like a hand person. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe it's not in the italic that I want it to be in. But there is a really good recipe. here that I just, I was struck by the deliberate nature of it. I mean, it's like Betty Crocker step by step. Here are very specific things that you need to do. Don't measure with your heart. Like you have to use the cup of blood, please. Yeah. This isn't like vanilla extract. It's really eye-opening. So I highly recommend to get into that chapter. Yeah. Get into that chapter because. Yeah, chapter six, everybody. Hands of Glory forever. And what's crazy about Hands of Glory. Like we were just talking about is that people really believed this worked, like really believed, like Steadfast. Why do you think that people put so much faith into that specifically? So if all you need is a handful of moments where it seems to have worked for people to say, see? So like, you know, one of the things that I have in the book is as an article from an Irish newspaper from mid-1800s where they're, they're, I said, it's like the police blotter in your local newspaper, right? So-and-so had I break in at her house. but they attempted to use a hand of glory and they did X, Y, and Z, and the thieves were thwarted. And, you know, you throw a couple reports like that in a newspaper and people start to believe that, yeah, this is going to work. Yeah. I mean, it's like confirmation bias. Right, that's exactly what it is. But it's also gross enough that very few people actually went about making them. That's true. So there aren't a, there's like a pub in England that used to have one on display. Oh, cool. They claim to have found it in a wall. But then it was stolen. Irony of ironies. A talism against theft was stolen a couple decades ago and they've never got it back. Bring it back. There's also a museum that has one. But there aren't a lot of them extant. So we also look at that and say, is it just a lot of story with very few examples? That's true. People believe that it would work. I mean, yeah. Would you have fallen for it back then? Do you think? Back then, probably. I feel like I would. I was ready to just, yes. Yeah. Yes. It's the hand of a thief. That's the thing. I might believe it now. Yeah. Like you said, you put that on your door. I'm not coming over. No. It kind of makes sense. Yeah. I don't know if I believe it for the thief. I believe it to thwart against. To thwart. Yes. That's where I like it. Also, the weird thing where you have to douse the flame. Like, there's a story in there about, and it's a, it's kind of legend, it's kind of fact, but of a pub that was being robbed by a traveler who came, set up the hand of glory, said this magical phrase. And the, the, everybody in the house who, was asleep, stayed asleep. But the housemaid who had been instructed to stay awake and take care of this traveler's needs was still awake. So she didn't go to sleep. And she was able to run to the kitchen and get milk and extinguish the flames because that's what you do. You use milk to extinguish the flames. So Hand of Glory is lactose intolerant. Apparently. There you go. There you go. Hey, let's go. A lot of us are. Yeah. I mean, you know, join the club. It wouldn't work in my house. Now, you have researched for lore as well, some really crazy cursed objects. Where do you think the hand of glory ranks among those objects? It's definitely on the far side of like the gross scale. Yeah. There are other, I guess, more neat and clean cursed objects. Yeah. Like the car that Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in, you know, was said to be very cursed in James Dean's car, things like that. But as far as like gross cursed objects, you know, like, Yeah. That's high up there. It's right up there. I would say so. Yeah. It's a tough one to make. Yeah. Like you got to get a person that you can take their hand. Yeah. So that's a lot. Yeah. You got to commit to it. I made a lot of hand puns in that chapter and I just want to. Love it. Preemptively apologize to anybody. They hit every time. No, don't even apologize. It's what you had to do. Yeah. Never for dad jokes and never for puns. Do you apologize here? Sometimes they just present themselves and you have to. You got to take them. You have to take them. Yeah. You can't let them pass by. You're speaking, Arling. You really are. We love a danger. We do. I feel like we've kind of foreshadowed this topic a bit. Talking blood. I love this concept. I never heard of it before the book. So tell me, do you think that people genuinely