Inhospitable

and dug out a musket ball. The second one was too deep for her searching fingers, and it would stay there for the rest of her life, long past the end of the Revolutionary War. They say clothes can make the woman, and sometimes they can make a woman into someone else. For Deborah Sampson, this meant she could become anyone she wanted, and in seventeen eighty two, what she wanted was to become a soldier, so she became Timothy Payer. Her stint as Timothy Payer, though would be short lived.

Deborah was outed shortly after enlisting in Middleborough, Massachusetts, and she was promptly discharged, But she then made a second go of it, joining rank with the Light Infantry Company of the fourth Massachusetts Regiment under the name Robert Shirtliff, and there she fell in step with the rest of the troops. She fit right in. She looked the part, and she knew how to play as a team. Deborah was from a large family, and when her father ran off,

their situation turned dire, so she went to work. Deborah was eventually hired out as an indentured servant to a wealthy household, where she bullied the boys into sharing their school work with her. She later became a teacher and brought in more income through like carpentry and basket weaving. As the War for Independence raged in the distance, Deborah felt her spirit stir. She wanted to help, but there

weren't many ways to contribute to the effort. As a woman that appealed to her, so she decided to go undercover. And it was there on a battlefield in Terrytown, New York, that Deborah, disguised as Robert, busied herself stitching up her wound, and once she was back on her feet, she studied herself, pulled her shoulders back, and headed to camp. The next year, Debora was reassigned to a unit in Philadelphia. A while there.

It was, of all things, a fever that led to her secret being discovered, but the doctor who treated her didden out her. Instead, he sent her to his own home to be nursed by his wife and daughter, and kept her truth quiet. The war was over by September of that year. The good doctor asked her to deliver a letter to her general, and her fears would come to pass. She correctly assumed that this letter would reveal the truth about Robert Shirtliffe and Deborah Sampson. She waited

for her punishment, but it never came. Instead, she received an honorable discharge, some words of advice, and enough money to get home. In eighteen o nine, she even began receiving the government pension that she was owed for her service. She lived out the rest of her life knowing that she could fully wholly take pride in who she had become, and that second musket ball it would remain entombed in her flesh, a reminder of who she had once been.

I'm Lauren Vogelbaum. Welcome to American Shadows. Zola Bennett's pulse quickened as she stood before the red brick house. Eyes roving, she scanned its face, her gaze settling on the front door. She went up the front steps and wrapped her knuckles firmly on the door frame, hoping that Amy would answer quickly. The specter of an old woman appeared from slight and unassuming, with her hair piled atop her head. She smiled and swung the door open wide. New faces to the Archer

Home were a frequent occurrence. As the proprietor of the rest home, Amy Archer Gilligan, made it her work to take in the old, the destitute, the infirm for a price. Of course, it was expensive to keep food on the table and the lights on, but she was providing a necessary public service to the small community of Windsor, Connecticut.

Growing old is not for the faint of heart. It was even less so back in the early nineteen hundreds, when multi generational families were becoming less common as more young folks were being lured off to the big city. Many communities were con hunting the strain of how to care for their growing elderly populations. Almshouses were an abysmal option, and religious organizations could only help so much. There was a very real social void and one that Amy made

it her mission to fill. Zola explained to Amy that she was newly without as a wealthy woman who had been married and kept for most of her life, she had no real practical skills, and she was lonely. She wondered if the stately Archer home would have room for another boarder. Amy naturally was beyond pleased. She ran a brisk and profitable outfit and had taken in a number of wealthy clients in the past. She loved that her

reputation preceded her and brought her good business. She had been at this line of work for about ten years. She and her husband James, had rented a place in nearby Newington early in their marriage. Their landlord had been an elderly man who needed assistance, and in exchange for room and board, the young couple learned the art of caregiving. When he eventually passed away, Amy and James rented the home from his heirs and opened up sister Amy's nursing

home for the elderly. There was no regulation on how these homes worked or what kind of care was provided, but Amy's reputation was sterling. They stayed there for a few years, until the Airs sold the home. Amy and James then relocated to the red brick house on Prospect Street, replete with a wrap around porch and a lush green lawn, and there they once again opened their doors to their inmates, as Amy called them. The couple drummed up business through postcards, flyers,

and newspaper ads. They recruited by word of mouth, and when people came knocking, they laid out their fees. Residents had to prove their financial assets, then fork over between seven and twenty five dollars a week for care or a thousand dollars flat for the rest of their god given time on earth. The latter was often seen as a bargain for many who came by were pretty healthy. They just wanted the company that communal living could provide, and because of this, the room slowly swelled with life.

Boarders took up residence, and the Archer home and family were busy. But these early happy days weren't to last. On February second of nineteen ten, James died suddenly an

undiagnosed kidney ailment. Corners would later say, Amy, just thirty six years old and with a young teenage daughter, was a breath away from becoming destitute, but in a stroke of luck, James Archer had a life insurance policy taken out by his wife in previous weeks, which allowed the two remaining Archers to keep their house and maintain their business. After that, Amy played the part of the pious widow.

She dressed in black, her Bible always nearby. She made generous donations to the Catholic Church, and she kept serving the most lonely people in Windsor. As Amy beckons Zola in The Young Undercover Detective, felt her skin prickle. She had heard rumors about this place and had been assigned to get to the bottom of them. She couldn't blow her cover. She was afraid that if Amy found out who she really was and something bad could happen. The house you see was the last stop for many, but

for reasons most never saw coming. Life at the Archer home followed a steady rhythm, and the day would dawn with breakfast and chores and the parent Calvinist work ethic that was enforced. Despite the price Borders ostensibly paid for rest, and though many came to the home to stave off loneliness, sometimes having twenty housemaids made them year for the quiet solace of days past. Each room was spartanly decorated with

a cot, a table, and a bureau. The inmates shared a community bathroom, which, as anyone who's ever lived with more than themselves knows, is a surefire way to accelerate tension in any relationship. And if anyone was ill on any given day, one Dr Howard frost King would come calling. He was also the medical examiner for the town. He often saw residents twice, once when they were ill and

once when they died. Amy kept everything moving. Just three years after James passed, she remarried a fellow by the name of Michael Gilligan, a hearty man with three sons, two daughters, and a healthy bank account. Romantics might hope that Amy did this for love, but the rest of us can imagine that she did this for security. Maybe their children were happy for them, and their friends too, but their neighbors were becoming a bit more wary of

the Archer home. Something it seemed just wasn't quite right. It's possible they were being paranoid. Isn't it expected that if people intend to live out their lives in a place, they'll do just that, but the neighbors couldn't help but take note of how staggering the body count was. They came one after the other in the dead of night. I'm a cob parade of stiff skin and bones that no one was supposed to see, but from which the neighbors couldn't look away. Amy, for her part, knew this

was all part of doing business. Well. Some people didn't like getting their hands dirty dealing with the dying and the dead, but she didn't mind. It was the living that sometimes gave her trouble, with families inmates trying to insert themselves into her work. But this was her domain and she knew best. It wasn't a glamorous job, but it was one that she was willing to do so long as she was compensated for her efforts. Franklin Andrews, a new resident, knew he would be one of those

bodies eventually. He had managed to eke out a comfortable living, but he was coming into his twilight years alone. He had two sisters who loved him mightily but struggled to care for themselves. So with his little bit of money from the sale of his family farm, he found his way to the Archer Home. Amy welcomed him with open arms.

For a thousand dollars, she would give him the care his sisters couldn't provide, and he was a fairly hale fellow, maintaining his good health with morning walks and household projects. But in time his health began to falter. His sisters weren't privy to this. They didn't know that he was slipping from life, so they were helpless in pulling him back. When Franklin's sister, Nellie phoned to see if she could come by for a visit, Amy informed her that her

brother was gravely ill. Just hours later he would be dead, spirited out of this world and out the back door of the house on Prospect Street. Nellie was shocked. She paid a visit to the country coroner and demanded to see Franklin's body, and when they presented her baby brother to her, she was shocked again to see that he looked great, certainly not as ill as Amy had led

her to believe. If this wasn't enough to rouse suspicion, there would be one more death that would turn heads Amy's very own husband, Michael, at his end on February twenty first of nineteen fourteen. Doctor King examined him and insisted it was heart disease. Even though he had seemed so robust, his friends were left very suspicious, and none more so than Karl Gosly. Gosly, you see, was a local journalist. He knew a thing or two about obituaries

and probably paid more attention to them than most. The cadence at which they came from the Archer home alarmed him. He went digging and came up with not just more obituaries, but death certificates, dozens of them. The pattern was glaring. The dead were shouting at him from beyond the veil and the print, and they gave him an idea. He grabbed his notebook and headed out to the local drug store, and there he discovered Amy had told the staff about her serious rat problem and had been in the habit

of purchasing huge amounts of poison from them. Zola Bennett knew that she had to time her undercover stay just right. Too short and her mission would be undercut too long, and she might not make it out alive. She had been assigned to the case by Hugh Allcorn, the States Attorney for Hartford County. Nelly had come to him with her suspicions, but Carl Gosly's ghastly discovery at the drug store was enough impetus to get the investigation under way.

The Connecticut State Police were in a race against the clock, which was really a race against Amy. The hours the residents had left on this earth were quickly ticking down. In nineteen sixteen, all Corn ordered the bodies of former Archer Home residents to be exhumed. As so not to stir the interest of the press, the work was done under the cover of night, so the dead were brought back to the surface of the earth a glow and a wash of gas light lanterns. Their organs were removed

and jarred and taken away for examination. And when they were analyzed by someone other than Dr King, something interesting happened. The organs were found to be harboring startling amounts of arsenic. It became clear that at least twenty residents had been murdered. End The paper trail the dead left behind was likewise damning. Bank statements, wills, and letters revealed large transfers from residents to Amy, and by the time the spring of nineteen

sixteen rolled around. All the ince was collected and the numbers were tallied. The final score, if we could call it, that, was shocking. The police arrested Amy on charges of killing at least sixty people, with forty eight of those deaths from the last five years alone. Amy was indignant she was doing the lord's work and having a trying time of it too. According to her, it was the peculiarities of old people that could account for all of this, with no wrongdoing on her side. The police and the

public didn't buy it. The crowd had to admit, though, that Amy cut a striking figure in her morning blacks as she appeared for her trial in June of that year. Alcorn was out to see her hang and stabbed the deck. With best medical experts around, it took the jury less than fifteen minutes to sentence her to death. As the gavel came down. It's hard not to wonder what it felt like for her to finally beyond the raw end of the deal. M Amy didn't have to live with

that psychic terror for long. She went on to appeal the sentence and received a new trial three years later. She admitted to guilt on one account of second degree murder, for which she was ferried away to the Weathersfield State Prison to begin her life sentence. Q Allcorn meanwhile went on to have quite a career after Amy Archer Gilligan. He prosecuted over fifteen thousand criminals and was stuck with

a nickname the Hanging Prosecutor. The trial had been a sensation and the fallout was uncomfortable for the tiny town of Windsor, but largely the story disappeared from the public's view, that is, with one exception. Years later, on January tenth, of a curtain went up on Broadway, playwright Joseph kessl Ring was running his new dark comedy. It had gotten

rave reviews and sold out every show. The story followed two elderly sisters who took in older gentleman borders, and if these ladies felt that a border was getting lonely or annoying, they gently dispatched him with a glass of arsenic laced elderberry wine between London and New York. The play would run for almost three thousand shows and was soon made into a film by Frank Capra. But on that opening night, there was someone very special in the audience.

One Hugh all Corn. He had helped kessel Ring with his research, which would forever cement the memory of Amy Archer Gilligan in the public's imagination with the play Arsenic and Old Lace. Amy meanwhile left us with one last twist. She was eventually declared temporarily insane and institutionalized in an asylum in nearby Middletown. Her short tenure ended up lasting

thirty eight years. And then it said that she was a model patient, sitting with her Bible or winnowing her hours away at the piano, playing funeral music to her heart's content. She also had chores to complete, like every other inmate there. Her job cooking and serving food to the staff and inmates of the entire establishment. There's more to this story. Stick around after this brief sponsor break to hear all about it. Elizabeth looked down at her

sad plate. They're baked into her bread was the husk of a long dead spider. Of the things she had witnessed over the past week, this was the thing that turned her stomach. She considered it. Hungry eyes and silent mouths watched her while nurses snicker in the corner. She slipped the bread to another woman, a small act of mercy in a place so cold. It was all she could do in that moment. It would be imperative to

stay the course and collect these moments. Elizabeth hoped she could keep observing and documenting what was happening around her and expose Blackwell Asylum in the newspapers for what it really was. Elizabeth had always been precocious, and she had always been a writer, but she was also a woman. Because of this, she had been relegated to the society pages, writing about debutante balls, weddings, and other goings on about town.

These things were not what she considered real journalism, but she held firm to the dreams of big bylines and bigger stories, leads with gravitas that would be hers and hers alone. For the chasing this, she decided these luncheons and galas would not do so. With a resolve as steely as the New York City sky, Elizabeth had blustered her way into newspaper editor Joseph Pulitzer's office. She promised she would deliver him a major story if only given

a shot. He was impressed, he was also skeptical, so Joseph decided to put her medal to the test and see if she could bluster her all the way into the asylum. Getting out, Elizabeth thought to herself, would be a bridge to cross when she got there. Elizabeth prepared herself the first step in her method acting project would be to look the part, So she became a boarder at the Perhaps on the Nose temporary home for females and began practicing her thousand yards stare. She would keep

herself up all night, eyes wide. She began to talk about her missing luggage and her trip from Cuba, and started accusing other borders of being crazy. No one appreciates disruptive roommates, and the police were eventually called. Elizabeth would later write that she was worried about convincing people she was crazy enough, As she would soon find out, it

really didn't take much. It was assumed that everyone who was taken to Blackwell deserved to be there, quite the opposite of the idea of being innocent until proven guilty. Right away, Elizabeth was treated as a lost cause, just another troublesome woman who needed to be handled. She soon was getting an up close look at the inhumanity only whispered about on the outside. The life the inmates led was no life at all. They were subject to beatings, chokings,

and near drownings, all often delivered wholly unprovoked. They were forced to labor and to sit on hard wooden benches for fourteen hours a day. They were drugged with morphine and chloroform, with a frequency so high that many of those held there really did seem to lose their minds. In the late eighteen hundreds, it was easy to commit

someone or becomemitted yourself to an asylum. Elizabeth met women who had been sick but couldn't afford medical care, and others who were considered burdensome by their families and sent away. Others still were immigrants who had been picked up by law enforcement for one reason or another. These were women society wished to forget, wished to disappear behind lock and key, to be kept quiet and out of sight. After ten days, Joseph Pulitzer sprung Elizabeth the women she had met there, well,

they'd hardly be so lucky. Two days later, she published her first report under the pen name Nellie Bligh. When the public realized the horrible extent of this truth, they were aghast. The article was explosive, sending shock waves throughout the country. The city was deeply embarrassed. By the time officials went to investigate the asylum, it was clear the staff had been hard at work cleaning up the building

was freshly paid, unted. There is better food and more adequate sleeping quarters, and everyone Elizabeth had spoken to and named in the article it seems had disappeared. American Shadows is hosted by Lauren Vogelbaum. This episode was written by Robin Minater, researched by Ali Steed, and produced by Miranda Hawkins and Trevor Young, with executive producers Aaron Manky, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. To learn more about the show, visit

grimmin mild dot com. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.