Can You Dig It?

out of the ordinary. They might even seem perfectly fine on the surface. They're the kind of folks you wave too on your way to work in the morning, or their kids might play with yours, and then suddenly they're on the news for doing something strange and horrifying. But Not Harrison G dire. He was different. Oh, he had plenty to hide. He just wasn't quiet about it. Harrison was born in Rhinebeck, New York, in eighteen sixty six.

His father was a chemist who had done well for himself and had left his fortune behind to support his family. After his death in eighteen seventy five, Harrison's upbringing was what could best be described as eccentric. His mother was a devout spiritualist, while his sister had a fascination with ghostly tales. Also living with them was a homeopath named

Lucy Hudson and her relative, George Hudson. The Hudson family treated young Harrison as one of their own, teaching him how to play piano and instilling in him a passion for natural history. As Harrison got older, he took an interest in butterflies and, although he graduated from M I t with the bachelor's degree in chemistry in eighteen eighty nine, he sought a career in the natural sciences. Instead, he wrote papers about moths and butterflies and composed his master's

thesis at Columbia on the subject of Lepidoptera. He was extremely influential in his field, naming roughly three thousand species of insects and six thousand types of Lepidopterans by the end of his career. He also raised all kinds of caterpillars and insects on his own, which aided in his thorough and crucial research. One might have thought that Harrison's obsession with insects would have made him a kind of boring guy, a hum drum fellow who was more comfortable

with his nose in a textbook instead about with friends. Well, he was anything but boring, but he definitely didn't spend a lot of time with friends, perhaps because he had so few of them. For one, Harrison had some serious compulsions. He would take notes endlessly, as though there wasn't enough paper in the world to collect them all. He often jotted things down on the backs of receipts and letters,

anything within reach. He also had his own system of symbols and shorthand that only he was able to read. His colleagues at the Smithsonian Institution had troubled deciphering his notes. As if that wasn't bad enough, Harrison's fellow entomologists didn't care to be around him either. He would criticize them to the point where they refused to work with him. One man resigned his position at a museum until Harrison was no longer conducting research there. But Harrison didn't alienate everyone.

In fact, he was quite the ladies man, entertaining the affections of not just one but two women simultaneously. There was his wife, Zella, and another woman named Wileska pollock, but his wandering affections took their toll on his mental stability. Even after he divorced Zella to be with will Eska, he challenged his compulsions into a new project. He started digging.

Little by little, the eccentric entomologist dug a series of underground tunnels beneath two of the homes that he owned in Washington D C. He dug downward, creating multiple levels with stairs and electrical lighting throughout. He even lined the walls with bricks. The tunnels were dug between nineteen o six and nineteen sixteen, after which Harrison moved West to California.

But later in nineteen twenty four, a truck happened to be driving by one of his homes in Washington D C when the driver felt one of his tires sinking. A hole had opened up in the street revealing the tunnel system below. Harrison confessed a few days after the accident to having dug the tunnels in his spare time. But that wasn't the strangest part of the whole ordeal.

Police and others found German newspapers dated nineteen seventeen and nineteen eighteen inside the tunnels the years we were fighting in World War One, and that begs the more curious question if Harrison Dyer had been away in California during that period, who had been using his tunnels? Everyone deserves a fair shot. Innocent until proven guilty is how the American justice system is supposed to work, although things don't

always go that way. But in eighteen forty nine, justice truly was blind in what was declared one of the fairest and most impartial murder trials in American history. And the WHO done it wasn't even the most fascinating part. It was the WHO solved it. Sixty year old George Parkman was a member of the Boston elite. He had come from a rich family and owned several tenement buildings

in the city. He would walk from one slum to the next collecting his rents at the same time every month, and heaven help the person who couldn't pay up is he. Aside from his job as a landlord, Parkman was also a loan shark, and anyone who couldn't pay back what they owed found themselves in a whole mess of trouble, such as doctor John White, webster, Webster was a graduate from Harvard Medical School and also a professor there. However, he had stopped practicing as a doctor and turned to

teaching chemistry and geology instead. He wasn't making as much money as before and he was in severe debt, so webster had gone to Parkman for help in maintaining his lifestyle. There was just one problem. He couldn't pay Parkman back. He was terrible at managing his finances and wound up mortgaging his gem collection to Parkman to cover some of what he owed. As things got worse, the former after went ahead and mortgaged the gems to two other creditors,

right under Parkman's nose. What he didn't realize that the time, though, was that one of those creditors happened to be Parkman's brother in law, who told him about what webster was trying to pull. Parkman went to the medical school and gave him the ultimatum pay up or face the consequences. Webster promised that he would have his money by the Friday before Thanksgiving. So Loan Shark Parkman showed up at around one that afternoon to collect what he was owed,

and he was never heard from again. His family believed that he had been mugged for the wads of money that he often carried. It had happened before, so they reached out to the police, who started asking around town for information. Local hooligans hadn't seen him and there was no sign of him in the Charles River either. Finally, they headed over to the medical school to search for any signs of him. Their first stop was the basement apartment of one of Webster's coworkers, a man named Ephraim

little field. Little field watched as the officers poured over his belongings and looked through his closets to no avail. Little field became their prime suspect. Since he lived in the school's basement, he was able to procure dead bodies from local grave robbers at any time, day or night. He also made money on the side by disposing of cadavers from accidental deaths as a result of poor medical care.

Little field was known to the police already, but they couldn't find any evidence in his apartment, so they moved on to webster himself. The professor was hold up in his lab next door when he let the police into conduct their search and, as with little field's apartment. They came up empty there as well. There was, however, a latrine and a locked closet in the lab that the officers asked about. Webster assured them that it was locked

for good reason. It was full of explosive materials. The cops left it at that and went on with their investigation elsewhere. But little field knew something was wrong. You See, he spent time in the man's lab as well, usually when webster was out teaching or gone for the night. But now whenever webster left his lab he locked the door behind him. Webster had also bought little field an eight pound Turkey for him for Thanksgiving, an unexpected gesture from a man who was often in debt and didn't

really interact much with his neighbor. So on Thanksgiving, when the medical building was empty, little field took a hatchet and a chisel and started to dig his way through the wall into the pit under Webster's private latrine, and after a few hours of hacking away, he found exactly what he was looking for. The police recalled once again, this time to go through the entirety of Webster's lab.

Little field, you see, had discovered a human pelvis inside the latrine, while officers found dentures and bones in the professor's furnace, and perhaps the most unsettling discovery of all was made in Webster's tea chest. Inside was the gem collection that he had mortgaged three times under, which was a rib cage with the leg inside of it. It seems, George Parkman, well what was left of him, had finally been found. Word about the murder spread throughout Boston. It

was the talk of the town. But who had been behind it? Had it been the esteemed professor or Ephraim Littlefield, the man who seemed to know just where to find the body? Maybe he had killed Parkman so that the school had another corpse to dissect, or perhaps someone had come to him to get rid of it for a small fee. Everyone was going to find out. Webster was

charged with Parkman's murder and put on trial. It was presided over by Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw, who happened to be the father in law of Moby Dick Novelist Herman Melville. It was a case of he said, he said, but after all the evidence had been presented and the witnesses had testified, the jury came to an easy verdict. Dr

Webster was guilty. It was a shock to everyone, especially webster, who believed that he would be acquitted due to his prominent status within the medical school and the Wider Boston community. Unlike little field, he had graduated from Harvard. He was a professor. He must have been framed by a jealous colleague, but that wasn't the case. After the verdict was announced, webster confessed to having killed Parkman by bashing him in

the temple with a piece of wood. He was ultimately hanged for his crimes on August of eighteen fifty and as for Ephraim little field, it was true that he worked alongside webster, but he wasn't a doctor, nor was he a professor. Little field wasn't rich or powerful. He was just a resourceful and curious man with a hunch that had blown a murder investigation wide open. Oh and he also happened to be the school's janitor. 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 come. And until next time, stay curious, yeah,