Ancient Origins

a healthy dose of luck. For many writers, a little friendly help can go a long way, even if it comes from the strangest of places. Pearl was born in Mound City, Illinois, in three but her family packed up and moved to Texas before she was a year old. Pearl was not someone who enjoyed school. She almost never picked up a book, and when her class work got to be too tough, she shut down completely and just stayed home. Pearl also lacked direction. She wanted to sing

for a living and didn't care about much else. Her parents moved again when she was fourteen, this time to St. Louis, Missouri, and Pearl started to take her dream a little more seriously. School was a non starter for her, but she dove head first into piano and voice lessons, and it seems she had a talent for both. A career in music seemed like a viable future for her, so when she got a little older, she moved back to Illinois for more advanced vocal training. From there, she got a job

working at a music company to make ends meet. At twenty four, Pearl met a man named John Howard Curran, and the two soon got married. Neither of them were big readers, but they enjoyed the occasional game of cards and lived a happy life together. Around July of nineteen twelve, though, something changed in Pearl. She met a woman who had always wanted to become an author. Her name was Patients,

and Pearl knew that she could help her. Despite having a limited education and no prior interest in reading or writing, Pearl transcribed the women's dictations onto the page. They worked together for hours at a time, word by word, as the beautiful prose took shape. Over the course of thirty years, Pearl and Patients wrote at least seven novels, as well

as countless poems and short stories. Patients seem to have a vast knowledge of other languages, different types of plants, and other esoteric topics, and she passed that knowledge onto Pearl, who was only too happy to assist. The two became so popular folks used to visit pearl letter home to watch as she and patients worked out the new story or poem. Among those in attendance were the family of Hadley Richardson, Ernest Hemingway's first wife. Critics hailed patience is

writing as vivid and descriptive. The editor of the literary journal The Mirror became so enamored with her he practically fell in love with her. He might have married her too,

if he had been able to see her. Unfortunately, only Pearl was able to communicate with pay patients, because the talented writer had died in sixte You see, on that faithful summer night in nineteen twelve, when Pearl claimed to have met patients, she and her good friend Emily Hutchings had actually taken out a talking board to communicate to Emily's late father, who had recently passed away, because Emily

wished to speak with him one last time. It took several attempts over many nights, but finally a message came through, but the message it spelled out did not come from Emily's father. Many moons ago I lived, it said, and again I come patients worth is my name. Except patients hadn't come to talk to Emily. She had chosen to speak through Pearl, who wrote down the spirit's messages one letter at a time with the help from the talking board.

As news of Pearl's literary seances traveled throughout her neighborhood, folks came to sit in her parlor and talk to patients. They'd ask her questions, and she would write them poems about the topics of their choice. Pearl's husband, John, also took copious notes during each session. If patients used a word that he didn't know, he would consult his encyclopedia for a definition. Of course, neighbors weren't the only people

interested in patients in Pearl. Scholars, therapists, historians, and other academics wanted to better understand the source of such literary skill, and all kinds of answers were offered up Pearl was channeling her unconscious mind, or that the talents of her ancestors had been passed down to her. Charles Corey, who headed up the philosophy department at Washington University concluded that Patients was nothing more than one of Pearl's alternate personalities.

But none of these people had ever sat with Pearl or studied her directly. Their deductions came from anecdotal evidence provided by news articles and secondhand accounts. The truth is, only one man ever got to sit down with Pearl, Walter Prince, the head of the American Society for Psychical Research. Prince wasn't a man to be trifled with. He had previously worked to expose psychic fraud alongside none other than Harry Houdini. Anyone studied by Walter Prince was inevitably found

to be a fake. And yet, despite the odds against her, Pearl allowed Prince to watch. He read her husband's notes, he interviewed her loved ones, and he attended her writing sessions. And when all was said and done, he declared Pearl to be the real deal. He had found no reason to believe Patience was anything other than what her medium had claimed her to be, a spirit communicating with the

world of the living from beyond the grave. Even today, the debate over Pearl's authenticity lives on The anti spiritualism camp still considers her a fraud, while her supporters want desperately to believe we can communicate with the world beyond our own. But maybe will eventually solve the mystery. After all, we have news articles, psychological analysis, and her husband's own notes from all her sessions. Perhaps someday we'll be able to piece the truth together. All it might take is

a little patience. Beneath the ocean's calm surface lives a world brimming with life, from majestic blue whales to fearsome great white sharks. There exists a delicate and rich ecosystem of animals and plants, unlike anything on land. Over the millennia, that life has evolved and adapted to survive a changing ocean landscape. But there are still traces of its history out there, and we might have come face to face with that history in The Zooyomaru was a Japanese fishing

trawler sailing just off the coast of New Zealand. On April it picked up a large, unidentified carcass that was pale and decomposing. It had been discovered about nine feet down, much deeper than a creature of that size should have been. None of the men on the boat could figure out what it was, but rather than keep the dead animal and contaminate the fish they had already caught, Captain Akira Tanaka told his crew to toss it back into the ocean. As they were swinging the crane over the deck, the

rope slipped and the carcass landed at their feet. Surprised by what he saw, one of the men on board, who had studied oceanography, pulled out his camera and started snapping. He took photos of the creature and recorded its measurements as well. He even sketched out what he had witnessed, but his drawings invited a lot more questions than answers. The carcass had weighed almost four thousand pounds and measured

roughly thirty two ft long. There had been four large fins on its side, a neck of about five ft long, and a six and a half foot long tail. Its internal organs had all been eaten out or rotted away, but there was still skin on its bones. They dubbed their discovery NeSSI, based on its resemblance to Scotland's famous Luckness Monster, and then they tossed it overboard. The photographer later hitched a ride on another boat and returned to Japan.

As soon as he stepped foot on dry land. He used the fishing company's dark room to develop his photos. He showed his findings to the owner of a company, who then outsourced analysis to local biologists. The photos weren't enough for any of them to identify it conclusively, but they had their ideas. A press conference was held by company executives to let the world know about their discovery. As a result, more scientists came forward with answers of

their own of a person. A scientist from Sweden determined that what the crew had found was nothing more than a dead basking shark. It might have been bigger than most others, but it wasn't anything unusual, according to an article in New Scientists magazine. Further analysis of the evidence seemed to confirm their assumptions. When a basking shark decomposed, its lower jaw and fins were the first to go. What got left behind looked like a very long neck

with a head on top. But not everyone agreed. Two Japanese professors had a much different interpretation of the evidence. To them, the animal in the photographs from the ship looked nothing like a shark. Decomposing over Otherwise, there were four well defined fins, a long neck, and a long tail, and the anatomical drawings seemed to corroborate that belief. Although no skin or tissue samples were taken, the pictures clearly showed evidence of red flesh and large nostrils on the

front of its drooping head. Also, this carcass had been found floating thirty miles off the coast. Most dead sharks typically washed ashore before decomposing. The ones that didn't had never been found as deep as nine feet under the ocean. The professors concluded that what they were really dealing with was a creature no one had ever laid eyes on

because it had gone extinct millions of years before. They believed, as crazy as it might sound, that the carcass dredged from the depths of the ocean wasn't a basking shark at all, but a prehistoric creature from the Mesozoic era. A plea csare I Hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by me, Aaron Manky

in partnership with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show and you can learn all about it over at the World of Lore dot com. And until next time, stay curious. Yeah,