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is gleaned from exploration. There might be hidden treasure within the walls of a home or buried in the backyard. For the Avery family in eighteen sixty one, that treasure wasn't just inside the home, The whole place was a gold mine. Daniel Dudley Avery was a legal dollar from Baton Rouge. In eighteen thirty one, he married into the Marsh family, a wealthy clan of landowners with their own

island near the Gulf of Mexico. The Marshes turned the island into a sugar plantation, as its soil and climate provided ideal growing conditions. But years later, after Daniel had become the sole owner of his in Law's empire, he made some changes. First, he renamed the island Avery Island. Next, he started digging around, eventually stumbling upon a salt mine

deep underground. Avery didn't know that the Native Americans who had originally owned the island used to harvest the salted trade with other tribes in neighboring states, but there it was. With his newly discovered income stream resting just below his feet, Avery started mining the island for its salt. At the time, two major events in his life happened. His daughter Mary Eliza Avery married a banker named Edmund Mcilhanny, and the Civil War just began. The Confederate soldiers in the South

needed salt desperately. It wasn't just used to season food. Salt was a powerful preservative, and the horses liked it too. Avery got into the business of providing the Confederacy with barrels of it until the Union eventually took control of the island in an operation known as the Great Salt Expedition. With the island compromised, Edmund fled with Mary to Texas, where he worked in finance for the Confederacy. After the

South lost, Edmund was suddenly out of a job. He moved with his family back to Avery Island, performing odd jobs around the plantation. His primary task was maintaining the garden, where Edmund took to growing all sorts of vegetables, including peppers. A friend of his, Mansell White, had gifted the former banker a bushel of peppers and a recipe to use them,

so Edmund planted the peppers for years. He tended to them, building them up into a viable crop which he could use in his recipe and then sell to folks on the mainland. He would pulp the peppers into a mash, then age them in jars over the ruse of a month, after which he'd pour in some vinegar and let the jars sit for another thirty days. Once the pepper mash had finished fermenting, Edmund would pour the sauce into glass cologne bottles and top them off with the cork stopper.

And then he would travel all throughout the Gulf coast selling his product to anyone looking to add a little flavor to their lives. Each bottle came with a little sprinkler attachment that made it easier to add it to food, and it seems the product was a hit. In his first year, he sold over six fifty of them for just a dollar apiece. Originally, many customers found the sauce too spicy. They didn't understand that it wasn't like other sauces,

which could be applied to food with wild abandon. Their delicate palets just hadn't adjusted to the spiciness. But once they did, they couldn't get enough of it. The sauce was so popular Edmund's company kept making it and continues to do so today. Although some things have changed in the old day is every pepper used in the sauce was grown right there on Avery Island. Today, though the peppers are harvested from all over South America and Africa,

where the climate is better suited to larger crops. The production of the sauce, however, still occurs right there on the island, except instead of letting the pepper mash ferment in jars and now ages in old bourbon barrels for up to three years. Millions of bottles are sold each year in grocery stores everywhere, and just about everyone would

recognize the diamond shaped logo on the front. That's right, the spicy topping invented just after the Civil War, putting a little family business on the map in the process. Is now a worldwide hit known simply as Tabasco sauce. When a trend gets big, people do what or they can to capitalize on it. One televised singing competition gave way to an entire genre. As people started taking more selfies, companies came out with sticks so that they could hold

their phones in front for a better vacation picture. And in the mid nineteenth century, the spiritualism movement gave rise to amateur mediums in home seances and for one man, a strange new way of communicating with the dead. Jonathan was a farmer from Ohio. He lived with his wife and nine kids, far from the hustle and bustle of city life. Jonathan didn't think much of spiritualism. To him, the people who practiced it were fakes and scammers, but

they were cropping up everywhere. To help put a stop to it, Jonathan started traveling to seances with the purpose of exposing mediums as frauds. There was just one problem. He started second guessing himself. Odd sounds, floating tables, and automatic writing could usually be explained away. However, during a visit to Hideville, New York, Jonathan met a medium who

changed his life and his outlook. This person pointed right at the skeptical farmer and told him that not only was he physically linked to the other side, but he might be the most powerful medium in the world. Well. Needless to say, Jonathan left New York shocked and soon returned to Ohio. When he wasn't tending to his farm, he was researching spiritualism. This time, though he was doing

it from a place of genuine curiosity and obsession. He spent the next several years learning everything he could and honing his techniques. He would sit at a table with paper and a pencil and lead his hand write whatever it wanted to, a technique known as automatic writing. He also began holding seances in his home along with the rest of his family. Jonathan had come to believe that not only had he become a powerful medium, the rest

of his clan were equally gifted as well. One day, during a session with his eldest son, a message came through from the spirit world. Jonathan was given instructions to build a room in which he and his family could contact the other side. The voice speaking through his son gave exact measurements for the size of the room, which was to be constructed within a log cabin on his property. The room was to be twelve feet by fourteen feet, accessible by a single door, and have three windows of

a specific size inside. He was told to hang bowls from the ceiling and place a variety of musical instruments like drums and violins around the space. The centerpiece would be the Spirit Machine, intended to be a spiritual amplifier. This device was meant to easily summon ghosts from their world and allow them to remain in hours for longer periods of time. Jonathan's oldest child drew the plans for the machine as the spirit continued to speak through him.

The base would be a six legged table six ft long two and a half feet tall. On top of it would sit a wooden frame for the device itself. A post in the center would support four curved pieces holding up drums of different sizes, all fastened together with wire. There was also copper wire wrapped in zinc that were networked throughout the rest of the table, along with metal rods, bells,

and glass knobs. All of it had to be perfect for the spirits, who depended on the machine to harness electricity in order to create an electro magnetic field in which they could manifest. When Jonathan finally finished the device, his family started holding seances in the room with up to twenty guests and attendance. Spirits would bang the drums and blow the horns around them while making other objects levitate, and yes, some spirits appeared in a floating, translucent form

right before their eyes. It looked as though the machine was working as expected. Many in the family's position would have charged a hefty sum to attend one of their seances, which had grown quite popular, but they only asked for voluntary donations. Unfortunately, as with most mediums of the day, Jonathan's family was eventually accused of faking their sessions. Linus Everett, an editor for a local newspaper, claimed to have seen one of Jonathan's daughters crawling around in the dark to

carry out a ghostly effect. Once the story got out, the family's fame turned sour. Jonathan stopped holding seances for the public and locked up the cabin for good. The mobs were so relentless that he his wife, and their kids were all forced to leave Ohio behind, moving to Illinois. A short while later. The family of Jonathan Cohon's and their spirit machine were never seen or heard from again.

They had been just one of countless mediums to be vilified in the press, but still, out of hundreds of guests who attended their seances, only Linus Everett had ever caught them faking an effect. Had everyone else been too shocked to pay closer attention, or had the family been the real deal after all? Without the cabin or the spirit machine it contained, we may never know, but we do have Nathan's plans for the device, making it possible for someone else to build another. For those who want

to know the truth, though, that means there's hope. With a little wire and a healthy dose of ingenuity, we could always just give him a call and ask 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. Ye