[SPEAKER_01]: morning, this episode contains details that some listeners may find disturbing. [SPEAKER_01]: In the winter of 1692, two girls and a personage in Massachusetts Bay began to convulse contort in cry out at invisible torments. [SPEAKER_01]: Their diagnosis was witchcraft, and a matter of months [SPEAKER_01]: 19 people will hang, one will be pressed to death beneath stones, and at least five more will die in jail.
[SPEAKER_01]: In centuries later, a tantalizing theory tried to explain the hysteria. [SPEAKER_01]: A poisonous fungus in the village rye that causes hallucinations. [SPEAKER_01]: This, of course, is the Salem Witch Trials, and tonight we debunk and dispel some of the myths surrounding one of the darkest chapters in early American law by exploring the Urgot Theory with none other than a whiskey historian. [SPEAKER_01]: This is a study of strange. [SPEAKER_01]: Welcome back to the show.
[SPEAKER_01]: I am your host Michael May. [SPEAKER_01]: I am about to introduce you to my guest Drew Hannish from the Whiskey lore podcast. [SPEAKER_01]: Drew has done a lot of research into the Salem witch trials and specifically the theory that it all came about because of ergot poisoning, which we will explain momentarily if you're unaware of that.
[SPEAKER_01]: But before I get into my interview with Drew, I wanted to share the basics of the Salem witch trials and the historical context of Salem village in Salem town at the time. [SPEAKER_01]: Witch hunting was real. [SPEAKER_01]: It's not just a Monti Python scene. [SPEAKER_01]: In medieval and early Europe, many theologians taught that the devil could grant malicious power to witches.
[SPEAKER_01]: As a result, a witchcraft craze swept the continent from the 1300s through the 1600s, tens of thousands of supposed witches, most of them women, were executed during this period. [SPEAKER_01]: The hysteria peaked in two distinct waves in Europe first in the 15th and early 16th centuries and the second in the 17th century.
[SPEAKER_01]: Though this craze was waning and dying down in Europe by the 1690s, the idea's legal procedures and fear of devilish people crossed the Atlantic with American colonists. [SPEAKER_01]: Not to mention that the Connecticut Witch Trials, which I've covered on this show, [SPEAKER_01]: occurred a few decades prior to Salem, so witchiness was in the air, it was part of the culture of the time, and I encourage new listeners to go back and listen to the Connecticut witch trial episodes.
[SPEAKER_01]: Those trials were much larger in scope than Salem, though not as deadly, and they're often overlooked today, but they're a very important part of American history.
[SPEAKER_01]: Communities in New England during this time were living in hardship, life was not easy, there are constant wars with Native American tribes, colonists were arriving into a new land, which [SPEAKER_01]: had a lot of political uncertainty, there were limited resources, and a lot of people were starting from scratch.
[SPEAKER_01]: On top of which, there were a lot of strong religious and cultural beliefs with the Puritans, and they didn't necessarily want others who didn't share their own religious beliefs to have the same rights and opportunities. [SPEAKER_01]: which is very interesting since they themselves are running away from religious persecution in Europe. [SPEAKER_01]: All in all, this context is important because it feeds the paranoia in social unrest at the time.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Salem situation itself began in January of 1692. [SPEAKER_01]: When two girls Abigail Williams and Elizabeth Betty Paris started to exhibit strange fits and odd behavior. [SPEAKER_01]: A local doctor couldn't find a natural cause and Louis Spurs began to spread that witchcraft was a foot.
[SPEAKER_01]: In late February, neighbor Mary Sibley instructs Tituba, who's thought to be an enslaved native American for the Paris household, to bake a witch cake, which was right-neal mixed with the afflicted girl's urine, and feed it to the dog to draw out the witch or witch is. [SPEAKER_01]: This concoction was imported from English folk practice.
[SPEAKER_01]: Tituba was soon accused to be a witch herself, and she ended up confessing that she was indeed a witch, and she accused Sarah Good and Sarah Osborn of being fellows in this. [SPEAKER_01]: demonic connection. [SPEAKER_01]: The witchcraft hysteria ignites in Salem village, the rural farming community that we now called Danvers, Massachusetts, and it spills into the surrounding towns. [SPEAKER_01]: The trials themselves convened in Salem town, which is modern day Salem.
[SPEAKER_01]: Before a special court, the court of Oer Interminer was established in May of 1692 by Governor William Fipps, and across 1692 and into 1693, [SPEAKER_01]: 19 were hanged, one Giles' Cory was pressed to death, and at least five passed away in jail. [SPEAKER_01]: More than 160 people were accused of being which is hundreds were examined, property was seized right suspended.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was, to put it simply, [SPEAKER_01]: In saying, part of the piece of the puzzle on how this happened and why executions ended up happening is because the court of lawyer and terminor allowed spectral evidence, which is testimony about dreams or visions. [SPEAKER_01]: To clarify, I could have a dream about my neighbor.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then I could say, hey, my neighbor was in my dream, she must be a witch, as accusations grew and then the executions followed beginning with Bridget Bishop and June, political and clerical pressure rose. [SPEAKER_01]: So after October 29th, Governor Fipps dissolved the court and the new Superior Court rejects spectral evidence and the Salem Witch [SPEAKER_01]: and no one will ever again be executed for witchcraft in New England.
[SPEAKER_01]: And now, my interview with Drew Hannish. [SPEAKER_01]: Hi Drew, how you doing? [SPEAKER_01]: I'm doing a good, how are you? [SPEAKER_01]: I'm doing great. [SPEAKER_01]: I'm so appreciative of your time and you wanting to talk about this subject. [SPEAKER_01]: And I'll tell my listeners, the whole reason I'm covering Salem is because you brought it up to me. [SPEAKER_01]: And you were like, hey, have you ever covered Salem before?
[SPEAKER_01]: But first, tell me a little bit about yourself, the book you've written about whiskey, and also your podcast. [SPEAKER_00]: OK. [SPEAKER_00]: Well, I mean, I grew up in the household where I had a father who was writing books. [SPEAKER_00]: He was a, [SPEAKER_00]: He was a Detroit policeman actually and retired and then spent his retirement years researching president's family's histories and doing genealogy on our family as well as presidents.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you could ask him anything in history and he would sit there for 30 minutes and tell you every detail he could possibly think of about it. [SPEAKER_00]: And so that's kind of what I grew up around. [SPEAKER_00]: I ended up becoming a web designer, and that's what I did for 22 years. [SPEAKER_00]: But I always had interest in the travel side of things.
[SPEAKER_00]: I loved history, but the idea of writing history to me seemed like to... That was something I would have had to go to college to do, and so I didn't really think that was my lane. [SPEAKER_00]: And so I got into actually doing travel writing. [SPEAKER_00]: as a side hobby, and I started a blog called Travel Feele's Life.
[SPEAKER_00]: What's interesting about that is that after doing some travel for a while and writing about it, I started finding that my travel was sort of frivolous. [SPEAKER_00]: It was like, you know, other people are posting the same pictures up on Instagram. [SPEAKER_00]: What is this all about?
[SPEAKER_00]: And but I had started going on theme trips and my first one was a James Bond trip across Europe and so I went to every location I could scout out from the movies and then posted all sorts of things about those adventures and when I got home I was actually doing a whiskey tasting with some friends.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was not a whiskey drinker, but they were trying to get me into whiskey [SPEAKER_00]: and we were all sitting around and they were talking about bourbon and telling me all the rules of bourbon and I'm like something doesn't fly right here for me. [SPEAKER_00]: These guys don't really seem like bourbon experts and having a father who was big in the history and you know, let's find the facts and all the rest.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm like, you know what, my next theme trip, I'm gonna go to Kentucky and I'm gonna learn about bourbon. [SPEAKER_00]: So, I planned out a 19 distillery tour in eight days and basically video blog, the whole thing. [SPEAKER_00]: And by the time I got done with the video blog, I felt like I was not only knowledgeable about bourbon, but I had fallen in love with the history of bourbon.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I was also confused because I would go to one distillery and they would say, oh, well, you know, the name bourbon came from bourbon county [SPEAKER_00]: seemed logical. [SPEAKER_00]: Then I go to another distillery and they'd say, well, it actually came from bourbon street in New Orleans. [SPEAKER_00]: And I'm like, okay, well, who's telling the truth here? [SPEAKER_00]: Exactly. [SPEAKER_00]: And so it sent me on a mission. [SPEAKER_00]: I thought I'm doing a travel podcast.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why don't I do a whisky podcast? [SPEAKER_00]: And I'll just [SPEAKER_00]: kind of do a Ken Burns style. [SPEAKER_00]: I'm, you know, telling the story maybe a little drama in there and then I'll interview people and I'll plug little bits in and I will debunk these myths. [SPEAKER_00]: I'll do my own research and so that's kind of where all of this started from.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was at a podcast convention in Orlando and while I was there, [SPEAKER_00]: I met a guy who said, you know, if you can teach somebody something you should write a book. [SPEAKER_00]: And so I thought, well, I could write a book on how to do the Kentucky Bourbon Trail. [SPEAKER_00]: So I wrote that book, put it out, right in time for a pandemic, great time for a travel book.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it gave me time to work on my whiskey lore podcast because I couldn't do my travel fuels life podcasts. [SPEAKER_00]: And now I'm up to six seasons that I've done of the whiskey lore podcast. [SPEAKER_00]: And I started finding holes in my own research which was driving me crazy. [SPEAKER_00]: I am a stickler for the truth. [SPEAKER_00]: I want to find out what is the reality [SPEAKER_00]: I love books with footnotes, most of the whiskey books don't have footnotes in them.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I'm going where are they getting all these facts from? [SPEAKER_00]: And it was around that time that I actually started doing research for a whiskey brand called Chicken Cock, which is a very interesting name. [SPEAKER_00]: Well, come to find out that Chicken Cox history actually goes back to some of the earliest years in Bourbon history and the people who owned the trademark didn't know that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I was going through courthouse records, I was learning about the founder, I was completely dispelling everything about their history. [SPEAKER_00]: and it got me interested in actually working on a history for Tennessee Whiskey because Tennessee Whiskey has never had a book written about it. [SPEAKER_00]: It's always always Kentucky bourbon or it's Jack Daniels. [SPEAKER_00]: But those are the only two subjects and so I was like I need to do some research.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well what was going to be 150 page book ended up a 400 page book with 600 [SPEAKER_00]: with me documenting every single thing I found in every courthouse record I found in every newspaper I found. [SPEAKER_00]: And that was really where things changed for me where I said, you know what? [SPEAKER_00]: From this point forward, I am a truth seeker. [SPEAKER_00]: I am going to be a stickler for trying to find the facts.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I also had to come to a realization with myself as we're going to find out today that sometimes there isn't an answer that you're never really going to get the full answer and that you need to be content with that or be content with the idea that [SPEAKER_00]: All of your research will get thrown out the window if somebody finds a newspaper somewhere that throws all of your theories out the door. [SPEAKER_00]: So yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: What are like two bourbon myths that you can debunk really quickly for our listeners? [SPEAKER_00]: Well, the first thing I can tell you is, and I actually read a book recently that said, I can definitively [SPEAKER_00]: definitively tell you that Bourbon's name did not come from Bourbon County, Kentucky. [SPEAKER_00]: Well, I can definitively tell you that it does come from Bourbon County, Kentucky.
[SPEAKER_00]: So wow, I found an advertisement in 1826, Vixberg newspaper of Vixberg, Mississippi talking about Bourbon County whiskey. [SPEAKER_00]: And in doing searches, I can find plenty of examples of Bourbon County [SPEAKER_00]: but I can find no examples of bourbon street whiskey. [SPEAKER_00]: I love it. [SPEAKER_00]: I don't know.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes. [SPEAKER_00]: Now, as I said, somebody may pull up the newspaper article one day and completely debunk that hard evidence on my side, but as far as I can tell, that's true. [SPEAKER_00]: The other thing is that you will hear, and this is something I'm gonna start working on another podcast series here soon, and one of my first stories is going to be old forster. [SPEAKER_00]: bourbon, they say that they are the first bottled bourbon.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I found in 1859, there was a ST suit whiskey that was called bourbon that was sold in New York City that was said to have come straight from the distillery and was shipped to New York. [SPEAKER_00]: And I can't tell if it was shipped in bottles or not, but it was bottled [SPEAKER_00]: at one point either in New York or in Kentucky.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now you may go, well, that's not really a bottle of bourbon then if they shipped it out in the bourbon barrel, it went through somebody else. [SPEAKER_00]: Well, that's the same thing that Oforster did. [SPEAKER_00]: Oforster was not a distiller at that time. [SPEAKER_00]: This guy at least had a distillery. [SPEAKER_00]: Oforster was just bringing in whiskey from other distilleries and bottling it.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, say that they were the first pure bottled bourbon [SPEAKER_00]: out of a distillery. [SPEAKER_00]: No, that's not that's not true. [SPEAKER_00]: I love it. [SPEAKER_01]: All right. [SPEAKER_01]: So we're going to switch topics, but it is related. [SPEAKER_01]: Okay. [SPEAKER_01]: Whiskey and Salem, they do kind of go hand in hand. [SPEAKER_01]: And by the weight, for those that think Puritans didn't drink or anything, they did. [SPEAKER_01]: They did drink whiskey.
[SPEAKER_01]: drank other spirits as well. [SPEAKER_01]: And so that was part of it. [SPEAKER_01]: But how did you first come across Salem witch trials and kind of tie it in with wheat or rye or any of that? [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, what was your start to this? [SPEAKER_00]: Well, it's interesting because this has been sitting in my list of things to research for about three years. [SPEAKER_00]: And mainly because it's just a very loose tie to whiskey.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's really the connection of [SPEAKER_00]: Exactly. [SPEAKER_00]: And the issue with Rye is that in Salem, they may have been distilling Rye, but in reality, at that time period, they were probably more drinking brandy or drinking, making gin out of Rye. [SPEAKER_00]: So it wasn't whiskey really didn't catch on until the Revolutionary War.
[SPEAKER_00]: Otherwise, rum was the thing to drink or brandy, or you had Dutch influence, you would definitely get some gin in there as well as English. [SPEAKER_00]: So, and actually English wouldn't be until the end of the 1600s, so because of the glorious revolution, because there was no gin until William of Orange came across, and he brought his native lands drink to England. [SPEAKER_00]: So, it's... [SPEAKER_00]: This is really interesting to kind of flow through all of that.
[SPEAKER_00]: But anyway, yeah. [SPEAKER_00]: But yeah, so I didn't really follow the story. [SPEAKER_00]: I knew it loosely. [SPEAKER_00]: I've been to Salem before. [SPEAKER_00]: I love going to Salem. [SPEAKER_00]: You really get in touch kind of with the people who were involved in all of this. [SPEAKER_00]: There's a lot of kitsch there as well, but still you can feel like you were there at the place that all of this happened. [SPEAKER_00]: So it's always been fascinating to me.
[SPEAKER_00]: But then one day I bumped into an article about Rye Madness, and that's what caught my attention. [SPEAKER_00]: I'm like, okay, I'm studying Rye Whiskey, and now I'm hearing about Rye Madness. [SPEAKER_00]: My first question is, this fungus that's growing on this Rye, is that something you would distill out, because that's where my brain is going. [SPEAKER_01]: That's what I wanted to ask you about.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_00]: My guess is, is that yes, because of the high temperatures you're running it through, [SPEAKER_00]: And so I doubt there would have been any effects from it through whiskey. [SPEAKER_00]: But you have to think about that time period. [SPEAKER_00]: They were making bread out of it because they couldn't grow wheat in New England. [SPEAKER_00]: It was too hard to crop to sensitive to cold and wet climates.
[SPEAKER_00]: So much more, they would have been growing right up there, which is something else we can thank the Dutch for, because they brought that over in 1625. [SPEAKER_00]: And then everybody kind of embraced it. [SPEAKER_00]: It became the secondary to corn as something for you to survive off of. [SPEAKER_00]: So a lot of times, if you were having your porridge in the morning or whatever or your bread, you were probably using the right grain for that as long as the supply was around.
[SPEAKER_00]: the problem with that time period was there were a lot of, it was the little ice age. [SPEAKER_00]: So there was a lot of bad weather. [SPEAKER_00]: You had seasons that were really bad, which created multiple problems such as you would have prices rising because of scarcity. [SPEAKER_00]: You have people hoarding the grain because of that as well. [SPEAKER_00]: And then you ended up with maybe using some stuff you weren't supposed to be using.
[SPEAKER_00]: which is where this concept of rye madness or ergo, which is the fungus, there's a technical name for the fungus. [SPEAKER_00]: I can't pronounce it yet. [SPEAKER_01]: Yes, I actually have that in my notes.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I'll specify what we're talking about the theory behind her git poisoning, the [SPEAKER_01]: clavisips per puria, which I'm definitely not saying correctly, it's a fungus that infects rye and it produces a toxic alkaloid ergodamine, and symptoms that you can have if you ingest this are tingling hallucinations, muscle spasms, essentially fits very similar to some of the descriptions of the Salem witch trials.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's really interesting that this all started with [SPEAKER_00]: who came down with all of a sudden having fits and hallucinations and all sorts of things going on with them, that nobody could explain. [SPEAKER_00]: And by the summer, you had the whole town hysterical over what's going on here. [SPEAKER_00]: And of course, it leads to trials where 19 people are put to death, and one man is actually crushed to death. [SPEAKER_00]: by a stone.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so in 1976, there was a behavioral scientist, her name was Linda Caprol, I believe, is how I looked up the caprol earlier. [SPEAKER_01]: I think it's Caprol. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_00]: So she wrote an article for Science Magazine. [SPEAKER_00]: And she was basically saying that [SPEAKER_00]: Well, you know what, they had bad seasons there. [SPEAKER_00]: There was probably bad grain around. [SPEAKER_00]: This fungus was a breeding ground for this fungus.
[SPEAKER_00]: So probably somebody ate this. [SPEAKER_00]: And this is where it all started from. [SPEAKER_00]: These two children ate it. [SPEAKER_00]: And then it just spread throughout. [SPEAKER_00]: And so she was really kind of connecting it to the whole Salem witch trial event.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now it's, [SPEAKER_00]: It's interesting because the first thing I wanted to know about it was kind of how did people know about this, you know, during that time period, because you would think the first thing they'd want to do is protect themselves again, something like there, they'd be smart enough to know to avoid this black fungus that's growing on grain. [SPEAKER_00]: And so I kind of had to dig in and learn the history of this fungus.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's interesting because it wasn't this woman, but [SPEAKER_00]: writer in the in 1982 came up with a whole kind of history of this fungus and talked about the even the Vikings probably dominated Europe because they didn't eat rye grain, but the people who lived in what is France were eating rye grain and they were probably weakened by this.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so it's really interesting because there were two strains of this, one of them, they call gangreness organism and the other is is the convulsive organism. [SPEAKER_00]: The convulsive organism is neurological. [SPEAKER_00]: That's the one that we're talking about with Salem. [SPEAKER_00]: The other one, body parts fall off. [SPEAKER_00]: Oh, no. [SPEAKER_00]: This was, this was, it creates gangrene, basically. [SPEAKER_00]: And so two completely different directions with that.
[SPEAKER_00]: But people didn't know about it. [SPEAKER_00]: And apparently, thanks to the little Ice Age lasting for so long, this helped it continue to be a problem and because people didn't know how to deal with germs and fungus and all the rest.
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, and so this woman comes up with a theory and then all of a sudden within six months in the same magazine, science magazine, two, uh, psychologists come along, Nicholas Spannos and Jack Gottlieb and they say, ah, that's, she can't, she can't prove that.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's no way she can prove that and then they start dispelling all that she's saying because they're saying, well, [SPEAKER_00]: The big issue is that you can't say that if one person ate this in the household, everybody ate it in the household, and that would happen in other households. [SPEAKER_00]: So anybody who was getting this would be contaminated by this fungus. [SPEAKER_00]: Well, that actually put a dead end on my research.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was kind of like, okay, well, that makes sense. [SPEAKER_00]: And so I kind of backed off of trying to research it any further, and so then I started trying to look for other things to find in this, I was going to say there is another tie to distilling by the way, and this is another reason why this always stays interesting to me and why it has not left my list of things to do research on. [SPEAKER_00]: women were the distillers in the household.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, that's interesting. [SPEAKER_00]: And after this, it became a male occupation. [SPEAKER_00]: Now why did it become something that men took over afterwards? [SPEAKER_00]: And so the only thing I can conclude from it is the fact that [SPEAKER_00]: If you're in a time of witchcraft, where everybody's talking about witchcraft and you are a woman and you're creating medications, which is exactly what distilling was. [SPEAKER_00]: It was not for pleasurable drink.
[SPEAKER_00]: Most spirits back then were so harsh that they had to basically tamp them down with herbs or anything they could find to fix the flavor of what it was.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it was spoonful of medicine, but if you're, if you're concocting something, [SPEAKER_00]: You know, if you're creating alchemy in your home and it's a time of witchcraft, especially if you're a woman on your own, you're a widow or maybe you're elderly or, you know, you don't want to be caught doing that because you're kind of putting a sign up on the door that says, hey.
[SPEAKER_00]: What am I doing here so that was another piece that I really kind of got interested in and and and it kept me going on it, but as I say, the problem that I ran into with this is that all of a sudden you get this this guy is dead end at these two men are dead ending this theory and as I said 1982.
[SPEAKER_00]: uh... another woman came along and said no way to second there is some validity to this but it seemed that historians were citing who with the two gentlemen uh... from Ottawa that had come up with this original uh... with this uh... debunking as being the most plausible [SPEAKER_01]: I did want to make a comment too, not it's not about distilling or the rye, but you mentioned the women were distillers and especially single ladies, old women were a focus.
[SPEAKER_01]: They were sort of had a target on their back during this time period. [SPEAKER_01]: I did some other episodes about the Connecticut witch trials. [SPEAKER_01]: And in my research on that, I learned that if someone was alleged to be a witch, their property and they were single, their property went to the town.
[SPEAKER_01]: They can split it up, they [SPEAKER_01]: So if there's an old lady, she's got a farm, she has land, she has valuables, it was a good reason for them to be like, well, you know, she is concocting something up there, I think she's a witch. [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, and I also get her house now, so let's do that. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_00]: Well, there was another thing, and along that line of thinking, because that has always been kind of my theory behind this.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think I've even heard somebody in Salem, maybe at the Salem, which museum or wherever, talk about it being a land grab or movies or there have been multiple movies on that. [SPEAKER_00]: And I'm sure it's been injected into my mind somewhere along the line.
[SPEAKER_00]: But as I was doing the research, I started, you know, after I'd given up on that, I just started going into things that raised my curiosity and somehow I ended up stumbling into a continuation of this thought process and going, maybe there is something to this ride madness idea. [SPEAKER_00]: And it was also arounding the guy, Giles Corey. [SPEAKER_00]: who was an 80-year-old man, he was a farmer, lived in Salem, and he was actually called up.
[SPEAKER_00]: There were six men, I think. [SPEAKER_00]: Total, that were accused of witchcraft. [SPEAKER_00]: I think so. [SPEAKER_00]: Yes, yes. [SPEAKER_00]: And he was one of them. [SPEAKER_00]: What makes his story different besides his age is that he was the only one that refused to plead either guilty or not guilty. [SPEAKER_00]: And what's interesting about that is it started driving me into looking deeper into why would he do that? [SPEAKER_00]: Why would he not proclaim either way?
[SPEAKER_00]: And according to English common law, if you refuse to plead, then you can't be put on trial. [SPEAKER_00]: And if you can't be put on trial, they can't take your property. [SPEAKER_00]: So it got me into this line of thinking, maybe this idea that they were doing a land grab here was real. [SPEAKER_00]: So I started really diving into it a little further.
[SPEAKER_00]: So 14 women, five men, all hanged at Gallows Hill, [SPEAKER_00]: uh... for the men died before jiles uh... i started looking into the uh... into the women uh... or into the last eight deaths actually because what's interesting about this timeline is that after jiles quarry uh... is is uh... was calmed stone was he was stone because it literally was what they did yeah and what kind of describe that here in a minute because it's important to the story
[SPEAKER_00]: Eight more people were put to death within three days and they were the last ones. [SPEAKER_00]: Now you have to ask why were they the last ones? [SPEAKER_00]: What was it that happened? [SPEAKER_00]: Well, if you go back and you look at how trials Cory died, basically because he wouldn't plea, they put a stone on him, a heavy stone. [SPEAKER_00]: I've seen the stone. [SPEAKER_00]: It's the size of a man. [SPEAKER_00]: It's huge. [SPEAKER_00]: It's a slab.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so they put this upon him and he had this on him for two days that he survived under this old man. [SPEAKER_00]: He's got to be brittle, 80 back in that time period, and yet he refused to plea. [SPEAKER_00]: And so they say the last thing he said in the courses is probably lore, but they say the last thing that he said was more weight.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes. [SPEAKER_00]: And then, and then he died, which showed a defiance that would explain why these eight people after him were the last. [SPEAKER_00]: Well, the other thing I needed to figure out was, what if why didn't they plea out? [SPEAKER_00]: Why did they, why did they plea? [SPEAKER_00]: Why didn't they just follow his well, because their court. [SPEAKER_00]: uh, hearings were before he was put under the stone.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh. [SPEAKER_00]: And so they just ran through and took them out. [SPEAKER_00]: Well, two of those women that were hung were very pious and they were, it was seen as there were multiple reasons why all of this stopped. [SPEAKER_00]: But part of it was, [SPEAKER_00]: Giles Corrie became a martyr at that point, and people were sick and by what had happened, and the government came in and said, no, this is getting absolutely ridiculous.
[SPEAKER_00]: What I couldn't find though was I started digging into the widows and seeing how many of them had their land confiscated. [SPEAKER_00]: very few. [SPEAKER_00]: In fact, it was a situation where maybe two or three of them, the men were as jiles shows, he was concerned about that apparently that he wouldn't plea, and they probably figured that everybody else was going to take his way out, so they weren't going to get any land after that anyway.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it is interesting to note that there are various reasons [SPEAKER_00]: which is what got me back into the chase on this idea of is this rhyme and this real or not because it reminded me. [SPEAKER_00]: that history is complex, that you can't throw a blanket statement over hardly any pieces of history, because there are always going to be cases where whatever you say is not true, where human beings, we all react differently.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you can think, you know, all of these people are the same, it's not true. [SPEAKER_00]: When I thought back to those two men and what they were proposing in their rebuttal, I was going, well they're talking about the whole community. [SPEAKER_00]: They're talking about every household and that the whole household has to be infected by this. [SPEAKER_00]: They all have to be eating the same food. [SPEAKER_00]: So obviously the whole household is going to come down with this.
[SPEAKER_00]: I started asking questions actually like, well, could this just be a childhood thing? [SPEAKER_00]: You know, I mean, could children be more susceptible to this? [SPEAKER_00]: Right. [SPEAKER_00]: That was my first thought, because the first two to die, or they didn't die, actually, they survived it were two girls and they were nine and eleven.
[SPEAKER_00]: And both of them, we don't know what happened to one, the 11-year-old, we don't know what happened to her afterwards, but the nine-year-old lived old age. [SPEAKER_00]: So that wasn't a particular case there. [SPEAKER_00]: But I was thinking, as I started thinking about it, I'm like, well, wait a second.
[SPEAKER_00]: My understanding of Salem's history is that it started out as the first few people were in hysteria or hallucinating, but then all of a sudden now it became truly a witch hunt where it was people pinning things. [SPEAKER_00]: on the others. [SPEAKER_00]: Now you can't put people who you're pinning things on under the same umbrella with those first two girls who literally were having hallucinations and they were having fits and they were, you know, they're a different category.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so you've already put a hole in the argument. [SPEAKER_01]: That's a really good point. [SPEAKER_01]: And let me ask you about that too. [SPEAKER_01]: So part of the story is that they claimed their, they're one of those, the slave for the household and the, the Paris household, Tituba is she had to make a witch cake at one point and like feed it to the dog and it was a way, I can't remember it's a way to ward off which is or find out if there is a witch.
[SPEAKER_01]: They were using right in the witch cake. [SPEAKER_01]: or the typical bread, and that was being fed to the two girls of the household, you're right, they could have ingested it. [SPEAKER_00]: I have two theories on this. [SPEAKER_00]: One is is that you could have a food that the adults don't eat. [SPEAKER_00]: There were husband and wife and there were two girls. [SPEAKER_00]: One was the daughter, one was orphaned niece.
[SPEAKER_00]: So these two girls may have been fed something that the rest of the family wasn't fed. [SPEAKER_00]: The other thing is, if you've ever been around kids, [SPEAKER_00]: when kids get together, they get curious about things, and they do things that they're not supposed to do, and kids will put anything in their mouth that an adult would never put in their mouth.
[SPEAKER_00]: So who's to say, because this was the other piece, I went back and I looked, when did, when did this occur and what were the conditions leading up to it in terms of the way the weather was and the situation with crops in 1691, the year before. [SPEAKER_00]: failing crops everywhere. [SPEAKER_00]: It was unseasonably cold and wet here. [SPEAKER_00]: That means we don't have a lot of crops.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if we don't have a lot of crops, you're basically taking every little bit that you can and you're protecting that grain because you got to survive until the next spring. [SPEAKER_00]: before you're going to have anything else to eat. [SPEAKER_00]: So especially these were who's a Reverend and his wife, they're not well to do people.
[SPEAKER_00]: So they don't have a money to go out and if the merchants in 1691 as I found records of were doubling the price of grains, [SPEAKER_00]: then they can't afford the essentials.
[SPEAKER_00]: So maybe your grain storage area over there is running low and the kids are in there playing and they pick up something and they chew on it and you don't know and so you throw that into a society who is and with a Reverend as the head of household [SPEAKER_00]: Then they don't ask, what did you just, did you eat something you were obsessed with? [SPEAKER_00]: It's the line of thinking, doesn't go in the right direction.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right, and then tying it into the whole idea of perhaps they were poisoned and someone else wasn't. [SPEAKER_01]: If we look at someone like Tituba, who I mentioned, she at one point, maybe even twice, she did come around to admitting, oh, okay, I'm a witch. [SPEAKER_01]: And I think maybe she really like reneged on that later and then came back and said, Oh, no, no, I'm definitely guilty of being a witch in part of that is because it was a witch hunt.
[SPEAKER_01]: And they would tell somebody, oh, we're going to treat you more lenient if you admit to your, your guilt or name names. [SPEAKER_01]: Tell us who else is a witch in town. [SPEAKER_01]: And you would find that over a course of which hunt history where people would admit to being a witch or name others because they wanted to be treated better or not hung or not killed for a variety of reasons.
[SPEAKER_01]: So you're right, even though people at the time thought the tissue was a witch, she's just saying that she's saying that she wants to be treated leniently. [SPEAKER_01]: She's not necessarily poisoned, like the other kids were if we follow that theory [SPEAKER_00]: This is the other thing about history that's really tricky, which is lenses, because there are multiple lenses on this story.
[SPEAKER_00]: One is it's very hard for the modern writer to put themselves in the shoes of somebody in 1692. [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, you can read all you want to read, but you're going to have sensibilities going on there that you're never really going to connect to or an event that occurred. [SPEAKER_00]: I always kind of put it back to, I was doing some research for music history. [SPEAKER_00]: And I was noticing that the music on the music charts changed completely in 1964.
[SPEAKER_00]: And why did rock music, that's when the beat [SPEAKER_00]: It's like the charts changed completely in a month. [SPEAKER_00]: Why? [SPEAKER_00]: Well, John F. Kennedy was killed in November of 63. [SPEAKER_00]: And that was a seismic shock. [SPEAKER_00]: And when that happened, the American innocence was gone. [SPEAKER_00]: Now we want to look somewhere else. [SPEAKER_00]: We want to look outside ourselves and the British invasion happens.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, if you're not actually putting the news and the events and the things side by side [SPEAKER_00]: You're never going to be able to put yourself into the lens of that is accurate on that time period. [SPEAKER_00]: And so I think about Tichibon, I think about the situation that she's in. [SPEAKER_00]: I agree, you and I probably would react that way, or we might think of somebody captive acting that way. [SPEAKER_00]: The hard part about it is, is that who wrote the story?
[SPEAKER_00]: you know, who is the one that got that from her to write it that way? [SPEAKER_00]: And now you have to also take their lens into account because they're going to have their own passions that they're putting in with the way that they're telling that story. [SPEAKER_00]: So this is where it becomes, you know, really, really difficult to say with any certainty.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's part of the reason whenever I hear somebody say, oh, it's definitely this, I go, that's a challenge because I'm sure we can find some [SPEAKER_00]: that are going to make it very hard for you to be 100% certain on any historical fact. [SPEAKER_00]: Even we can even talk about the news today and we'll have multiple lenses coming on on the same news story. [SPEAKER_00]: So imagine going back, I mean, that was part of what I did with lost history of Tennessee, whiskey.
[SPEAKER_00]: I spent an entire summer reading nothing but stuff from the 1860s, 70s and 80s, Tennessee. [SPEAKER_00]: And you want to talk about having, like, surrounded by a different mindset, um, it was difficult, but it was one of those things that I had to do because I had to understand why certain things were happening and try to get in the shoes of the people that were making all this stuff go on and how they would react.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I could at least get close, not perfect because, you know, [SPEAKER_00]: We can't go back, there's nobody to ask. [SPEAKER_00]: We can't go to the barn and do some forensic evidence searching. [SPEAKER_00]: All of it's gone. [SPEAKER_00]: So all we can do is from whatever somebody is told us.
[SPEAKER_00]: And as long as that's all we have, then I say that this initial researcher was right to suggest that this is a possibility and that to deny it is to basically just be stubborn in your thinking. [SPEAKER_00]: I can see what the two scientists did or the two psychologists did when they came upon this. [SPEAKER_00]: They said, eh, you know, and then they went in and they searched just enough to show their thesis was correct and then they stopped. [SPEAKER_00]: They didn't dig further.
[SPEAKER_00]: If they did, if once they found the answer, they were looking for, they then didn't challenge that because that's what history's got to be. [SPEAKER_00]: It's got to be, I have the answer, but you know what? [SPEAKER_00]: It's probably not the answer. [SPEAKER_00]: I need to keep looking and see if I can dispel my own truth. [SPEAKER_01]: you're just to clarify for everybody.
[SPEAKER_01]: So you're saying the theory of the poisoning from from Rye is valid and you have to consider it even though there's good evidence to say maybe it wasn't, but you can't just be 100% in either way because of a lot of the reasons you've just mentioned. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I don't I honestly don't think from what I've researched that there is good evidence to dismiss it and this is what's interesting and maybe I just don't remember as well.
[SPEAKER_01]: So please please help me remember this, but when we spoke about this before. [SPEAKER_01]: My memory, if my memory serves, you said, have you done Salem because there's this theory of Ryan area poisoning, and it's not true. [SPEAKER_01]: I can debunk it. [SPEAKER_01]: Is it that what you told me? [SPEAKER_01]: And I think maybe I misremember it. [SPEAKER_00]: I did say that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you know what's interesting is that I went back and I looked at my notes for the debunking. [SPEAKER_00]: And then when I started doing the research after that I was like, [SPEAKER_00]: you know. [SPEAKER_00]: But, um, and it's really interesting because it's the way the mind works in the fact that that was my mind made up before I started digging really deep into research.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I've just pulled that as an echo back from the past thinking that I had found a strong tie when in reality that was my old researching method of basically [SPEAKER_00]: kind of find the answer. [SPEAKER_00]: Once you found the answer, you're good. [SPEAKER_00]: You're good. [SPEAKER_00]: You're good. [SPEAKER_00]: Which is what these two gentlemen did. [SPEAKER_00]: What's they got to a certain point?
[SPEAKER_00]: They got the answer they were looking for and then they didn't go any further. [SPEAKER_01]: Right, right. [SPEAKER_01]: I think it's fascinating and and I'll also mention just because I love film, but the movie The Witch. [SPEAKER_01]: Have you seen that? [SPEAKER_01]: Have you seen The Witch? [SPEAKER_01]: I don't know if I have. [SPEAKER_00]: Is that modern? [SPEAKER_01]: It's modern. [SPEAKER_01]: It was maybe eight years ago, something like that.
[SPEAKER_01]: It made by a filmmaker named Robert Heger's who I love and he's very much a researcher, but it's highly influenced. [SPEAKER_01]: It takes place in the same time period and deals with a family that's been kicked out of their town and things happen. [SPEAKER_01]: a slight nod that perhaps it's all air got poisoning, but the influence of this theory has gotten out there.
[SPEAKER_01]: People do think of it, people do consider it, even though it is a controversial theory specifically with Salem, but it does happen. [SPEAKER_01]: It's not like this is a made-up thing, either. [SPEAKER_01]: It is a very real thing. [SPEAKER_01]: So we know that it's real, we know they're growing [SPEAKER_01]: And I love this art too that you've brought up, not to harp on it more, but it's just me thinking through it that it could have been part of Salem, but just not everybody.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right. [SPEAKER_00]: Exactly. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_00]: It didn't have to go past the first two kids. [SPEAKER_00]: It's my understanding that it started becoming like the next phase of it was kids trying to maybe or young women sort of playing off of it. [SPEAKER_01]: Absolutely. [SPEAKER_01]: And I want to ask you, too, did you come across in any of your research?
[SPEAKER_01]: The symptoms of the poisoning is one of the things I read about that could point Pointed away from being actually what happened in Salem is that vomiting and diarrhea are some of the symptoms with the poisoning and that's not what they were necessarily exhibiting [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's, uh, although in the notes I have, it says may occur, but they're not always emphasized. [SPEAKER_01]: Now, and also, we don't necessarily have records keeping track of the vomiting or diarrhea.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_00]: Well, when I could have been experiencing either, the other piece of this is, you know, [SPEAKER_00]: is in the mild case, is it they survived? [SPEAKER_00]: And I have read that this has been a deadly fungus. [SPEAKER_00]: So that was the thing that was sort of throwing me off of it too, because I thought, well, I mean, they didn't die. [SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, could it have been that?
[SPEAKER_00]: However, if they just had it in small amounts, or maybe the fungus wasn't fully developed, or, I mean, there's a number of things that it could potentially be. [SPEAKER_00]: But yeah, it's just hard to say. [SPEAKER_00]: Now they called it Saint Anthony's fire because you also got a burning sensation from it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and, you know, [SPEAKER_00]: that if your kids come in and they're complaining that they're burning, their skin is burning and you're a reverend and it's 1692, you might be thinking, that is Satan. [SPEAKER_00]: It's got to be. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and I'm always fascinated with how everything's connected, right? [SPEAKER_01]: Everything and the witch trials, one of the most fascinating aspects of this situation, [SPEAKER_01]: is that it influenced America.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is the birth of our, of our country, essentially, and the laws and the situations that happened then had a major influence on everything that came after.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's what I love about bourbon history, or I say bourbon history, whiskey history, because so many of our taxes are all set up around, you know, that was, we hear stories about [SPEAKER_00]: that there was tariffs that paid for our money back in the early 1900s, late 1800s, but in reality there was also a whiskey tax and that whiskey tax had to be taken out.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the reason that we have income tax is because they needed to replace the whiskey taxes, so we could go into prohibition in the United States. [SPEAKER_00]: Otherwise, we had lost the revenue. [SPEAKER_00]: What's interesting to me is that after prohibition, nobody was saying, [SPEAKER_00]: Okay, well, we got the whiskey money back. [SPEAKER_00]: We can get rid of, uh, uh, income tax now. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_00]: Nobody was it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, there was one guy that was thinking that way. [SPEAKER_00]: It's so funny. [SPEAKER_00]: I did find that there was one example of one senator who was like, yeah, we, we probably should get rid of this now, but he was quickly pushed out of the way, so yes, and, and I'm going to keep keep diving into this there will be an episode on my podcast about it at some point because I just I find it fascinating and I don't know that I could fit it into a book.
[SPEAKER_00]: but I can definitely look at doing an episode around it. [SPEAKER_00]: So yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: Nice. [SPEAKER_01]: I love it. [SPEAKER_01]: I love I did not expect you to go where you went today. [SPEAKER_01]: I was just going to come in and debunk this old theory. [SPEAKER_01]: But now there's there's a bit of validity that you have to consider it could have happened. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: And I really love that. [SPEAKER_01]: I appreciate it.
[SPEAKER_01]: So where can people find you and listen to your show or buy your books? [SPEAKER_00]: Well, best place to find everything is at whiskylord.org and there I'll have my links to my podcast and also to my books. [SPEAKER_00]: But you can find my books on Amazon as well and it's lost history. [SPEAKER_00]: It's trying to see whisky and whisky lore which debunks 24 whisky myths. [SPEAKER_00]: So your initial question.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's 24 of them in there, and it's not just American whiskey, it's Canadian whiskey, it's Irish whiskey, it's gotch, so everybody's up for grabs when they come to my whiskey debunking, so yeah great, great. [SPEAKER_00]: Well, thank you so much, Drew. [SPEAKER_00]: I'll talk to you soon. [SPEAKER_00]: All right. [SPEAKER_00]: Thank you so much. [SPEAKER_00]: Appreciate you having me on.
[SPEAKER_01]: you've just listened to a study of strange, consider helping us keep the lantern lit, illuminating the unexplained by subscribing to our sub-stack, just head to the support tab at a study of strange.com. [SPEAKER_01]: Until next time, stay curious and stay strange.