One chilly morning in February nineteen twenty five, eleven year old Eleonora Zugan and her eighteen year old cousin left their rural farming village of Talba in Romania to visit their sick and elderly grandmother in the neighboring village of Boohi. Eleonora, who never owned a pair of shoes, did well to keep pace with her cousin as they skipped over the frosty ground and made their way into a thick forest.
As they moved deeper into the trees, ear Leonora caught sight of something shining on the ground among the ferns and rusty dead pine leaves. It was a coin, partially wrapped in a handkerchief. Someone must have dropped it, she thought, as she bent down to pick it up. Don't, said her cousin. Suddenly, it's the devil's money. Eleanora stared at her cousin for a moment, then looked back at the coin. It was more money than she ever had in her
possession before. Don't do it, he said, but Eleanora ignored him. He was only jealous that she'd found it first, she thought, then bent down again. And picked it up. The cousin strode off her head as Eleanora rubbed the coin against her coat and held it up to the light, admiring how it gleamed in the morning sun. When they arrived in Boohai, Eleonora stopped at a little confectionery shop, where she spent all the money on some pastries and candy.
More of Eleanora's cousins greeted her on her arrival at her grandmother's house, including one who gave her a pretty coral change she'd made as a welcome present, But when they asked if Eleanora would share her treats with them, she refused to do so. The cousins crowded eagerly around her, but she pushed them away, crabbing the sweets into her mouth as fast as she could. She almost made herself sick just to avoid having to share any of it.
Eleonora's blind, one hundred and five year old grandmother was horrified by her granddaughter's behavior. It was bad enough that she'd taken the coin in the first place, she said, but the fact that she'd hoarded all of that food for herself confirmed that it was already having a malign influence on her. Despite being tired and sick, she couldn't help but scold her granddaughter. You have swallowed Dracool, she hissed,
and now you'll never be free of him. Dracool Romanian for the devil, had never seen her grandmother so animated before. It was enough to make her question what she'd done, and in the days to come, those words would echo again and again in her mind. You'll never be free of him. You're listening to Unexplained and I'm Richard McLean Smith. It began the very next day, as Eleanora and her cousins were eating breakfast in their grandmother's kitchen, a barrage
of noise suddenly enveloped the house like gunfire. The children dropped to the floor in terror as windows shattered all around their heads. Eleonora peeked out from behind her fingers to see a flurry of stones flying against the house, seemingly out of nowhere, as if they'd been thrown by an invisible, malignant force. Over the following days, it was said that wherever Eleonora went, small objects shifted and flew
through the air towards her, without any obvious cause. Growing Tired of the mayhem, Eleonora's grandmother sent her back home, hoping what appeared to be some kind of curse would leave with her. Sure Enough, the strange phenomena followed Eleonora back to Talpa. After a few days of objects flying around their house at will, Eleonora's parents became desperate, believing she was being haunted by the devil. They took Eleonora
to a monastery in the mountains. There, an exorcism was performed on her, but the exorcism did nothing as the disturbances carried on. It was with great regret said one priest that he had to inform her family that Eleonora was now beyond help. This strange story of an eleven year old girl seemingly possessed by demonic forces soon caught the attention of the local press, who ran a front
page story about Eleonora. In April of nineteen twenty five, in Germany, an article written by Romanian journalist Kobi Klein caught the attention of the Ravallo Bund, a spiritualist and parapsychological organization devoted to investigating the potential of the paranormal. So intrigued were the group by Eleonora's story, they offered to pay Fritz Grunewauldt, a German engineer who also moonlighted
as a parapsychologist, to go and investigate her. Grunwaldt was a key player in the German parapsychology movement at the time and had several pieces of equipment for testing and measuring supposed psychic abilities. He gladly accepted the offer. When grunewald arrived in Romania, he was disappointed to find that Eleonora had since been removed from the monastery and placed in a psychiatric asylum, where she'd been left to languish
ever since. With the help of Kubi Klein, grunwald had her removed from the asylum and returned her to the monastery in order to study her without any interference from doctors, and there for the next six weeks he observed the young girl, writing extensive notes about the many bizarre events
he supposedly witnessed. One Sunday morning, as Grunewald later wrote, he was sitting quietly outside on a verandah with Eleanora, when out of nowhere, a small, gleaming object appeared behind Eleonora's head, It hovered in mid air for a moment, and then dropped onto the floor beside her. It was a silver chain which Eleonora had given as a present to the monastery's cook some days earlier. According to Grunivult, the incident had happened in broad daylight, and neither he
or Eleanora had moved an inch. The chain had moved all by itself. Another time, Grunivald decided to see if he could have some influence on what was happening when in the company of Eleanora, he decided to fixate on a water jug that was placed on a stool. After five minutes of staring at it, the jug, which was full of water, apparently began to rise a good half a mint in the air before returning to the stool
without a drop of water being spilt. Having felt he'd seen enough, Grunivald published a short statement confirming that, in his professional opinion, the phenomena occurring around Eleonora were genuinely paranormal. He promised to publish a full report in due course. However, not long after his encounter with Eleonora, Grunivald died suddenly from a heart attack in the end. His report was published posthumously and caught the attention of Austrian Countess Soy
Vasilko SERETCHKEI. In addition to being a wealthy and influential aristocrat, Countess Vasilko Seretchke was also a parapsychologist who'd long admired Fritz Grunivold's work. She was determined to continue what he'd started, and so in January nineteen twenty six, she brought Eleonora to live in Vienna under her protection. Despite her belief in the paranormal, the Countess was in the main a grounded and sensible individual with many years of experience in
her field. In fact, she had recently drawn the ire of some of her contemporaries after publicly exposing one so called psychic as a fraud. But within a few days of meeting the girl, Basilico Seretchki had no doubt she was in the presence of something truly paranormal. Over the next eight months, the Countess brought in a variety of experts to observe Eleonora. The first was a medical doctor
who conducted a thorough physical and mental examination. He concluded she was in good health aside from an extreme skin sensitivity, and highly intelligent for her own. The assessment was backed up by famed British paranormal investigator Harry Price, who traveled to Vienna in April to also study Eleonora. His first impression was that Eleonora was stubborn, sometimes sulky, and highly suspicious of new people, but had grown very attached to
the Countess. Pryce also noted that Eleonora was strangely immature in some ways, later writing that although thirteen years old, Eleonora is like a child of eight in many ways. She is incessantly playing with toys more suitable to a child half her years, and will spend the day amusing
herself with squeaking animals, rubber balls, and furry rabbits. Between January and August of five, nineteen twenty six, Countess Vasilko Seretchki recorded more than three thousand separate incidents that she believed to be paranormal, more than eight hundred of which were corroborated by other people. One such individual was Johannes
Maria Vervaian, a German philosophy professor. Throughout the day, as he kept watch on Eleonora, he noticed that the books on a shelf behind her head were slowly moving forward, as if being pushed by an invisible hand. He took note of which books had been moved, trying to find some pattern or message in their titles, but no pattern could be found. Objects also appeared and disappeared at will, often seeming to travel through walls or locked doors and
dropping into the middle of a room. They were generally small, every day things, hair brush or a set of dominoes, for example, seeming, as Harry Price noted, to briefly exist outside of the dominion of the physical laws of our world. At other times, mysterious rapping noises were heard on the furniture surrounding Eleonora, as though some invisible presence was knocking on them. One evening, Harry Price was watching Eleonora closely. His gaze occasionally shifted down to his notebook as he
recorded her movements. Then suddenly something whizzed past him, so close he felt the air shift against his cheek as it clattered to the ground. Price saw it was a ten inch steel letter opener. If he'd been standing just a hair further to the right, its blade would have sliced right into his skin. Though he was no stranger to ominous events. Price was deeply unnerved at the time. There was nobody in the house besides him, Eleonora and the Countess. As he later claimed, he was watching both
of them when the blade launched itself at him. There was simply no way that either of them could be responsible, he believed. But more than that, he couldn't help thinking that the violence of this gesture was some kind of warning sign if Eleanora had indeed been possessed by something. Whatever it was, he felt was getting angry. A few days later, Price was back at the Countess's house to observe Eleonora again. Vasilko Seretchki asked the young girl to
move a table. As she was in the middle of doing so, the trio heard a deafening crash from the other side of the room. We all span round just in time to see a bizarre sight. A large black toy dog, which had been left on a chair in the far corner of the room, had fallen onto the floor, knocking into a metal coal scuttle that had clattered loudly onto its side. Just a toy, and yet the sight of it lying there on the ground was unmistakably ominous.
Throughout European history, the black dog had long been a symbol of foreboding, misfortune and death. In folklore, ghostly black devil hounds often appear to wayward travelers as a harbinger of imminent doom. Having gathered several months worth of observations, the Countess and Harry Price had plenty of data to work with, so they set out to try and find patterns in the psychic phenomena. There was one consistent thing. Whenever these events happened, Eleonora was always either in the
same room or an adjoining one. As they pored over their findings, they soon found some other correlations. The phenomena often happened shortly before meal times, when Eleonora was hungry. They also seemed to be stronger whenever she was in an irritable mood, and they never happened when Eleonora was sleeping. It suggested to the Countess and Price that the supposedly psychic events were strongly tied to Eleonora's moods and therefore
to her consciousness. Even still, she seemed to have no control over them at all, with Price noting that she seemed as startled as anyone when objects flew across the room or appeared and disappeared at will. As a parapsychologist, more than anything, the Countess was fascinated by the possibility that the key to this bizarre situation lay within Eleonora's mind. Perhaps she wasn't being possessed by an external paranormal force at all, she thought, but instead she was the paranormal force.
The Countess began to suspect that the psychokinetic events were rooted in Eleonora's repressed feelings of guilt and shame caused by her grandmother telling her that she had swallowed the devil. Countess Basilko Seretchkei began to carry out psychoanalysis on Eleonora in the hope of releasing any unconscious emotions that might be tormenting her, But she was not a trained psychoanalyst,
and the sessions only seemed to make things worse. One afternoon in the summer of nineteen twenty six, Eleanora cried out in pain, clutching her arm. The Countess hurriedly pulled back her sleeve to find a bite mark on the girl's pale skin, deep enough that it had drawn blood. At first, the Countess in Price suspected she'd done it
to herself. They hadn't been watching her at the time, But over the next few weeks, more and more fresh punctures and cuts appeared all over Eleanora's skin, many of them in places they felt she simply couldn't have reached herself. One other afternoon, the Countess was making another set of notes when a piercing scream rang out. The Countess looked up in horror to see Eleanora staring wide eyed at her Her face twisted into a haunting look of abject terror.
She held up her hands, both of them had countless needles sticking out of her skin. It was only when the small beads of red began to appear on the girl's face that the Countess realized it was also covered in needles buried deep into her flesh. The Countess and Price did their best to calm the screaming girl. The event left her with a pox like scars that didn't
fade for weeks. Worried that her own methods of psychoanalysis had intensified whatever was affecting Eleonora, the Countess immediately discontinued the sessions, she decided to try something new instead. The practice of automatic writing as its roots in spiritualism, which is the belief that it's possible for living people to communicate with the spirits of the dead. In the spiritualist version, a seance is conducted in which the subject is asked to hold a pen against a piece of paper, but
not consciously attempt to write anything. Then, after a period of calling forth any supposed spirits that might be in attendance, it is hoped that the subject's hand might then be manipulated by a spirit. Any writing that emerges is thought to be a message sent directly from the other side. However, in the early twentieth century, a new school of thought merged around automatic writing, attributing the process not to external
supernatural forces but to an internal psychological process. Being a parapsychologist, the countess was open to either possibility. One morning, she set Eleanora up in the parlor of her house with a pen and a large sheet of paper, and then waited for a long time. Nothing appeared to be happening. Eleonora was mostly just bored and restless. Suddenly her expression changed. Her eyes lost focus and glazed over. Then her hand
began to move against the page. The Countess watched over Eleanora's shoulder as one letter after another was scratched out on the page in jagged block capitals. It was a promise that more strange events would follow. At five pm the following day, it was signed Drac who the Devil. All day, Eleanora and the Countess waited nervously for five pm to come around, but when it did, nothing happened.
The investigation had hit yet another dead end. In the autumn of nineteen twenty six, nine months after she'd first brought Eleonora to her home, the Countess decided that she'd done all she could to unravel the mystery. Many people had been interested in Eleonora's case, but had been unable to travel to Vienna to study her in person. So that September, Countess Forasilkosretchke and Eleonora began an ambitious voyage
across the continent. They started in Berlin, where first a team of doctors studied the girl, then German zoologist Karl Zimmer. From there they moved on to Munich and then to London. Thanks to Harry Price's detailed publications about her case, Eleonora became an international sensation. Publications including The New York Times, reported on her arrival in London, and research as clamored
their chance to examine the so called Tupa poltergeist. But for all their efforts, nobody could arrive at a solid explanation for what was happening to Eleonora, and though they didn't know it yet, their window of opportunity was coming to a close. In February of nineteen twenty seven, just over a year after Countess Vasilko Seretski first brought her to Austria, Eleonora at her first menstrual period. It was said that from that point onwards, the supposedly psychic phenomena
steadily declined. The final apparent psychokinetic event is said to have taken place on June seventeenth of that year. Later that summer, Eleonora returned to Romania, relieved to find that her so called curse didn't not follow her there by all accounts, Eleonora went on to live a perfectly ordinary life out of the public eye. She married and worked as a hairdresser and manicurist. She also maintained her bond with the countess, who by then had become like a
mother to her. Eleonora Zugan died in nineteen ninety six at the age of eighty three. To this day, the truth about what exactly had occurred in those early years of her life remains unexplained. This episode, written by Emma Dibden and produced by me Richard McLean Smith concludes Unexplained. Season seven will be taking a short break now until
season eight, which will begin on Friday, September sixth. For the weeks in between, I'll be sharing some more of my favorite episodes from season's part and maybe a few other things, so listen out for that. If I may have your attention for a moment, Before I go, I want to leave you with a personal message from me. But first I want to thank all the fantastic writers that have contributed to the show this season. Thank you
so much. Firstly to Emma Dibden. Emma is a fantastic freelance journalist and writer and author of two books to date, Through His Eyes and The Room by the Lake, which you should go and check out. Secondly, thank you so much to Ella McLoud. Ella is another brilliant author who also has two books out currently rapun Zella or Don't Touch My Hair and the map that led to You, which I highly recommend and which you can purchase at all good bookstores. And last, but not least, thank you
so much to doctor Diane Hope. Diane is a fantastic audio producer and sound recordeded in her own right. You can find out more about her work and her personal coach in field recording, sound design and podcast production at Dianehope dot com and on Instagram at in the Sound Field. And lastly, but very much not least, I want to thank you all for being the most amazing audience of all time. I know some of you have been listening to the show since day one and I can't tell
you how much that means to me. And for anyone who's new to the show, welcome and thank you too for giving us your time. So yes, finally, I want to say a few words in a way I don't really tend to do one Unexplained about the world as it is today. There are many reasons that I don't share my own thoughts and feelings in Unexplained episodes or on social media. Mainly it's because that's not what Unexplained it's about, and it's certainly not what any of you
come here for. Who needs to hear my take on anything? But it's also because if I took the time to comment on whatever terrible, atrocity or tragic thing happens to be occurring in the world at any given time, I'd barely have time to breathe. And for the most part, I don't think one tragedy is more deserving of attention
over another. So please don't take this as a dismissal of everything else going on in the world right now, because I haven't mentioned something specific, But today I do want to say something specific to all my amazing American listeners out there. There's a big election coming up in November, and you may be nervous about which way it's going
to go, So I just want to say this. I firmly believe that just because someone doesn't see the world in the same way that you do, or want for the same things, that doesn't make them a bad person. It is, of course possible to live side by side with people who don't have the same political leanings as you. I grant you It's not always easy, but it is possible.
I also think there is a huge difference between the level of hostility that's seems to be festering in the country as it may feel online or in the media, with how it actually is out in the real world.
I don't believe that, for the most part, if you were to look to that neighbor of yours who might not vote like you in real life, that you will feel anywhere near the animosity you think you feel for them if you regard them simply as part of an amorphous group of people who don't share your political views. I believe for the most part that we're all ultimately striving for the same thing, we just disagree on how to get there. I think you're still a long way
from descending into a genuine, all out civil war. But the fact that it isn't wholly inconceivable that you can watch a film like Alex Garland's Civil War without requiring any suspension of disbelief is frankly horrifying. Equally, that I can wake up to the news that the Republican candidate for the presidency only narrowly escape being assassinated on live TV without being entirely surprised is astonishing. This will, no
doubt have haunted many of you. But when you think back to that moment in the days, weeks, months, and years to come, perhaps think not about the shooter or the intended target, but think instead about the innocent people in the audience who are not so fortunate. Think of Corey Comparator, who, in the moment of deadly chaos, did the only thing he could reasonably think of. He put his arms around his family to save them at the
cost of his own life. Regardless of your politics, this deeply human and crucially relatable act is the defining moment of that horrific event. For me. Empathy, as ever, is always the key experience art, watch movies, read books, read novels especially, and not just stories that you will personally relate to. Watch, read and listen to stories about how
other people feel and experience the world. No doubt you all already do, but if not, I can promise you it will open up gateways in your mind that you didn't know existed. And above all, listen to music. It's the closest thing we have to the truth. Until next time, I wish you all the best. Unexplained as an Avy Club Productions podcast created by Richard McClain smith. All other elements of the podcast, including the music, are also produced
by me Richard McClain smith. Unexplained. The book and audiobook, with stories never before featured on the show, is now available to buy worldwide. You can purchase from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Waterstones, and other bookstores. Please subscribe to and rate the show wherever you get your podcasts, and feel free to get in touch with any thoughts or ideas regarding the stories you've heard on the show. Perhaps you have an explanation of your own you'd like to share.
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