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This episode was sponsored by Progressive. You're listening to this podcast, so I know you've got a curious mind. Here's a helpful fact you might not know Drivers who switch and save with Progressive save over $900 on average. Pop over to progressive.com, answer some questions and you'll get a quick quote with discounts that are easy to come by. In fact, 99% of their auto customers earn at least one discount. Visit progressive.com and see if you can enjoy a little cash back. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates national average 12 month savings of 940 by new customer surveyed who saved with Progressive between June 2024 and May 2025. Potential savings will vary. Still waiting in line? Again, that's time you will never get back. Save time and money with stamps.com over 4 million businesses have skipped the line with stamps.com, join them to save up to 90% off carrier rates from your computer or phone right now. Print postage for certified mail, registered mail and packages in seconds. Then schedule a pickup right from your home or office for a limited time. Go to stamps.com and use code podcast for a free welcome gift. Taxes and fees apply. It's a lesson I think all of us understand. Some things just don't mix oil and water, Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner or 2,000 pounds of gunpowder and a bolt of lightning. Now, if you're thinking that last number is oddly specific, well, there's a reason for that. Because unfortunately, £200,000 was exactly the amount of gunpowder being stored in the basement of a church in Brescia, Italy, during one heck of a thunderstorm. It was August 19th of 1760 and the sky was lit up with electricity. Wind lashed the houses while the winding streets filled with rain. And then a single searing lightning bolt shot down through the bastion of San Nazaro's bell tower and landed in 90,000 kilograms of Venetian gunpowder. And look, if I was in charge of 17 elephants worth of explosives, I probably wouldn't have stored it in the tallest, most lightning prone building in town. But this was the 18th century, and back then, people believed churches to be the absolute, absolute safest place to store something dangerous. After all, God wouldn't let anything bad happen to a cathedral, right? Well, not so much. The gunpowder ignited. The massive explosion not only blew up the church, but one sixth of the entire city. Rocks shot a full kilometer into the air, crushing people and buildings as they plummeted to earth. Windows exploded and the rainstorm gave way to a downpour of broken glass by the time the smoke cleared, it was estimated that upwards of 3,000 people were dead. Electricity is a mysterious force. It's capable of miraculous creation and destruction alike. It can illuminate a light bulb or reduce a towering oak tree to ash. And sometimes, if history is to be believed, it can even give a real live person superpowers. I'm Aaron Manke, and this is Lore. At first we thought that it came from the gods. After all, how could something as strange, as powerful, as unpredictable as lightning be anything less than divine? Of course, we know differently now. Lightning is merely a giant electrical spark created by atmospheric conditions, as good old Ben Franklin and his chitinous storm experiment famously helped demonstrate. But you have to remember that wasn't until 1752, pretty darn late in the grand scheme of human history and for all those thousands of years prior. Well, what we lacked in scientific understanding, we made up for in folklore. Now, you're probably already familiar with the Greek God Zeus, known for wielding lightning bolts as a weapon and zapping badly behaving mortals when he got annoyed. But it turns out Zeus lightning strikes weren't just weapons. They could also tell the future. For example, if he hit a certain spot on the ground, it meant that he was marking it as holy and a temple should be built right there. He would also send lightning based signs and omens, even warnings of dangers to come. And so to interpret these, the Greeks invented a fortune telling method called divination by lightning. When the Romans came along, they just transferred all this same mythology onto their own Zeus equivalent, the God Jupiter, and developed a ceranomancy system of their own. A left to right lightning bolt, for example, meant good things to come. Right to left, though, you better watch out, because this one meant that Jupiter was not pleased. But here's the thing. While the Romans took their lightning God straight from the Greeks, plenty of isolated cultures had strikingly similar figures. In Mesopotamia, for example, there was a storm God named named Adad, who, just like Zeus, was usually depicted clutching an armful of lightning bolts. And over in India, same thing, where the Hindu storm God Indra wielded a deadly thunderbolt of his own. And lest we not forget, Thor of Norse mythology and his magical hammer Mjolnir, which had the power to, yes, produce thunder and lightning. It's a lot of overlap for such disparate parts of the world, but it does make sense, right? Lightning is a massive, powerful force that comes down from the sky to seemingly punish the world below. It sounds like God behavior to me. But then again, not all Cultures associated lightning with the gods? No, others believe that it came from the birds. Take for example, the Tambuka people of southern Africa. These folks believe lightning was caused by a large black bird with razor sharp claws. Get caught by this bad boy and he'll leave long streaking scars across your body. Scars that I can't help but notice sound a little like the branching scars found on the victims of of lightning strikes. Elsewhere in southern Africa, the Xa people have a different lightning bird known as the impidulu. This guy generates lightning during a hasty flight down to earth, where it lays its eggs on the ground. Now, apparently only women can see its true form. To other genders, it appears not bird like at all, but like a regular human being, which might be a problem. You see, you're gonna want to know when you have an impedulu on your hands, because making lightning isn't its only hobby. Impadulus are also big fans of drinking human blood and stealing babies. Meanwhile in North America, everyone from the Sioux of the Great Plains and the Tlingit of the Pacific Northwest to the Great Lakes Ojibwe tell tales about the giant lightning causing creature called the thunderbird. Some tribes depict the thunderbird as a massive bird of prey. Others a hybrid of a human and a bird. But all versions share two essential details. One, the thunderbird's wing beats cause thunder, and two, it can shoot lightning from its eyes. In Sioux tradition, the thunderbird can also visit you in your dreams. In fact, those who dream about the thunderbird are supposed to then dedicate their lives to being a sort of sacred fool known as the hyuka. In addition to living as clowns, these hyuka live every day, like opposite day. They dress for cold weather in the summer, claim to be full in times of famine, and generally have to say the opposite of what they mean forever. And yeah, suffice to say, thunderbird dreams are pretty high stakes. But don't think that you can get away with having a thunderbird dream and just keeping it a secret. Refusing to become a hyoka after such a dream has consequences. What kind? Well, you'll be struck by lightning, of course. Speaking of which, there are all sorts of legends about what happens to people or things who are struck by lightning. Let's say you're out on a picnic and you find that your bottle of wine has been struck by a lightning bolt. Well, you might want to stick with water. According to the Roman philosopher Seneca, drinking lightning struck wine will cause the drinker to go insane and die. On the other hand, in 1684, Increase Mather, Cotton Mather's father and the sixth president of Harvard, wrote that venomous animals who were struck by lightning and I quot lose their poison altogether. Meanwhile, Chinese legend holds that if lightning strikes a mountain stream, the stream disappears and ginseng grows in its place. And let's say you want to protect your house from being zapped. Well, according to French and Flemish folk belief, simply place a piece of lightning struck tree under your bed and you're good to go. But then again, lightning can't always be escaped. And sometimes it's not just houses and streams and bottles of wine that get hit. Sometimes the victim is you. Now, sure, given the common idea that lightning is chucked deliberately by the gods, being struck is usually seen as divine punishment. But then again, in the high Andes of Peru, the gods select their healers by hitting them with lightning. The most powerful healers, they're struck not just once, but up to three times. I can't imagine what happens to a person after three lightning strikes. Heck, maybe you do end up with magical healing powers. Because here's the While the folk tales are one thing, there are plenty of real life lightning strike survivors whose lives have changed forever. And sometimes those changes are so much stranger than fiction. Greta was absolutely electric. And not just because of her lively personality, complete with iridescent muumus and a beehive hairdo. No, when I say she was electric, I mean that literally. It was 1961 when a bolt of lightning sprang through Greta Alexander's bedroom window and set fire to her bed while she was in it. But that wasn't the end of her. In fact, it was only the beginning. Because rather than kill her, that rogue spear of lightning gave Greta psychic power. Hours. Or at least she claimed so to everyone who would listen. Before long, this lightning struck psychic was the hottest guest on every TV and radio show in her native Illinois. By the mid-1970s, she'd even begun using her supposed psychic skills to help the police. Although, to be fair, exactly how helpful she was is up for debate. In any case, she quickly became a local legend with the product line to prove it. She had a 900 number that fans could call for inspirational messages. She sold astrology charts, T shirts, fortune cookies, even shaving cream, and would read your palm for just 40 bucks a pop. In short, she sounds like a scam artist, doesn't she? But consider this. Greta Alexander isn't the only person to have claimed psychic abilities after a lightning strike. Far from it. In fact, there's a whole bevy of first hand accounts right on the National Weather Service website. I started to know so much, such as when I was being lied to, said a survivor named Blair. I could see who was a bad person and predict when things would happen. Another by the name of Thice wrote, I found myself somehow knowing things about folks I didn't know well and from another survivor named Missy it's almost as if I get ESP every once in a while. There have been times where I speak someone's name, someone that I haven't heard from or seen in many years, and all of a sudden they walk in the door or the time I knew my plumbing was going to back up in the laundry room. And sure enough, that night happened. Now, before you go running into a lightning storm hoping to get zapped with superpowers, might I remind you that lightning is more likely to give you a heart attack than esp. And sure, if you survive, which on the plus side, 90% of victims do, you might still be left with burns, muscle spasms, numbness and sensory problems in the short term as well as long term muscle pain, heart problems, cognitive impairment, and even an entire personality change. And then there are the stranger symptoms. Some lightning strike survivors believe that they've become permanently electrified. They claim that their watches lose time, batteries drain rapidly while they're around, cell phones and computers behave strangely, credit cards become demagnetized, and lights turn off in their presence. And the weirdest thing, Many say that these incidents are more frequent when they're in an emotionally heightened state, as if their feelings have a current of their own. Now look, there's an explanation for everything. Most skeptics chalk the effects up to confirmation bias. After all, if you're convinced that your body can drain a battery, you'll be a lot more likely to notice when your iPhone is dwindling. Right? But I will admit, it's hard to ignore just how common these experiences seem to be. And then there are the people who appear to become electrified without ever being struck by lightning at all. Meet Caroline. She was a Canadian teenager in the 1870s who, after a long illness, found that she had become, well, electrified. According to the newspaper reports, she delivered shocks to anyone she touched, knives would jump into her hand, and needles would hang from her fingers. To quote an article in Ontario's Daily Expositor. When she entered a room, a perceptible influence seized hold of all others. And while some are affected to sleepiness, others are ill and fidgety till they leave and even for a considerable time afterward. One article even dubbed the Kid, and I quote, a perfect battery. A couple of decades later, in the 1890s, an illiterate country girl. That's a quote from a newspaper from Missouri named Jenny Moran, found herself in a similar situation. Jenny would light up any room she entered, literally. Like Caroline, she zapped everyone that she touched, which was probably a fun party trick, until she picked up a cat and electrocuted it to death. But perhaps the weirdest incident of all. That would be the 1967 Rosenheim Poltergeist case. That happened in, of all places, a German law office. It was almost as if the place was haunted by a poltergeist. The phones rang endlessly, but when employees answered, there was no one on the other line, only what staff described as a presence. Then other equipment went on the fritz as well. Lights turned on and off on their own, photocopiers gushed fluid, and the phone calls became downright incessant. At first, everyone thought that it was just a prank. But no, it was all too elaborate for that. Figuring that there must be some wonky thing going on in the wiring, the office switched to a backup generator. But that didn't help. Photocopiers turned on by themselves, spitting out sheet after sheet of blank paper. Light bulbs rotated in their sockets and once hanging pictures, flipped to face the wall. In short, things had gotten completely out of hand. Now, at this point, the law firm's boss, a man named Sigmund Adam, was at the end of his rope. He got the police involved, as well as the phone and electric companies. And together they discovered a rather, well, shocking coincidence. The malfunctions only occurred when one specific employee was inside the building. Her name was Ann Marie Schneider, a 19 year old secretary. And when Adam rigged up some electrical monitoring, well, he was amazed to see that whenever Anne Marie entered the office, the entire building experienced a power surge so strong it should have blown out the fuses. So what did Adams do? Well, he fired the girl. It turned out to be okay, though she had always hated him anyway. And what do you know? As soon as she was gone, the unexplained electrical issues stopped entirely. So what was going on here? Well, some think that Ann Marie simply despised her boss so much that she engineered an elaborate theatrical prank just to mess with him. Others think that it was a hoax that Adam himself created to drum up publicity. After all, once the wild story got out, business absolutely boomed. But then there are the other theories. You see, in the midst of all the chaos, a parapsychologist named Dr. Hans Bender came and interviewed Anne Marie, he didn't think that it was a hoax at all. On the contrary, he became convinced that the effects were not only all too real, but actually the result of heartbreak. You see, Ann Marie was going through a breakup at the time, and she was taking it badly, very badly, to the point where she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. What if Dr. Bender asserted her distress was so intense it was manifesting as poltergeist activity? And, yeah, that sounds pretty suspect to me. But then again, what is a brokenhearted teenager if not the epitome of a walking storm cloud? The year of 1846 had just begun, and Angelique Cottin was 14 years old. The peasant girl had lived an unremarkable childhood in the village of Beauvigny, France, a simple, provincial existence. I can im young Angelique, like any teenager, lying awake in bed and waiting for her life to start, waiting for a spark. And in January of that year, a spark is exactly what arrived. It was a rainy month, the sky troubled by frequent storms, by thunder and lightning. Electricity the papers recorded seemed to charge the very air. Meanwhile, Angelique and a few other girls were hard at work in Angelique's aunt's house, busily weaving silk into gloves, when suddenly, Angelique's heavy oak weaving frame G gave a wild jerk. The girls blamed each other for upsetting the frame and then got back to work. But then it happened again, and this time there was no mistaking it. The frame had moved on its own. Now, as you can imagine, the girls were totally freaked out by this. They fled the house, babbling about witchcraft. But when they told the adults what had happened, no one believed them. And so they had no choice but to go back to work. And once more, when Angelique sat down and reached out her hands, the wooden frames started violently rattling before she'd even touched it. This was only happening to her, mind you, not the other girls. And when it repeated the next morning, Angelique's aunt got to see it as well. The shaking frame, the disembodied jerks. Yeah, let's just say that the adults started to believe the girls. That is, they were sure that poor Angelique was demonically possessed. But when her aunt brought her to a priest, the priest concluded that it wasn't a spiritual issue, but a medical one. So her parents took over, dragging her to doctors and scientists all across the region. Although skeptical at first, the doctors all soon observed the same thing. Angelique seemed to have become repellent. Chairs would skid away from her. Papers and pens would fly away from her touch. Even a table once floated into the air just as she passed by. Baffled, the doctors watched as gusts of wind rose around Angelique from nowhere. Even with the windows closed, small objects would fly away from her at a single touch, or even by brushing against her apron. When she tried to lay in bed, the bed frame would tremble and even levitate, making it impossible to rest. According to an article published a few years later in the Atlantic, and I quote, shovels, tongs, lighted firewood, brushes and books were all set in motion when the girl approached them. A pair of scissors fastened to her girdle was detached and thrown into the air. And then there's the question of how Angelique affected people. Standing near her, the hair on your arms would rise on end as if with static, and if she touched you, you would receive a violent electric shock. All of this already sounds strange, but there's more. You see, it seems that the effects were worse at night, between 7 and 9pm and when she was standing directly on the earth, almost as if she drawing the power up from the ground. During these two hours in the evening, the phenomenon was so strong that she could only stand or sit on the floor. Why? Because any furniture that she tried to sit in would rocket away from her. Her left side seemed to be more powerful than her right, though, and often felt hot when the phenomenon was going on. And her pelvic area was also abnormally charged. For poor Angelique, it was debilitating, a sort of Midas touch. If instead of everything turning to gold, everything you touch was electrically shot out of reach. She couldn't hold anything, she couldn't sit down at night, she couldn't be close to other people. Standing on rugs or wax paper did ease her symptoms a bit, as did sitting on a cork covered stone. But these were only brief fixes. Soon enough, the effects would return in full force. Also, and this is extra weird, touching the north pole of a magnet would give Angelique herself an electric shock rock. But touching the South Pole, nothing. It seemed like the phenomenon was caused by some kind of magnetic field. But that wasn't all. You see, the scientists were amazed to find that her mood affected this phenomenon. When she was exhausted, agitated or frightened, the electricity seemed to calm just a little. But when she was careless or distracted, she was basically the human equivalent of rubbing a balloon on your hair. It wasn't long before Angelique became known as the Electric Girl of Beauvigny. Now, sometime during all of this testing and tinkering, lightning struck Angelique's parents. Not actual lightning. Just the bolt of an idea, you see. They knew that they had something special on their hands. And so they started hosting private shows where Angelique would exhibit her powers to a paying audience, of course. And so, between doctor's appointments and visits from curious scientists, Angelique transformed from a peasant into a performer. It had only been a couple of months since the whole phenomenon had begun, but word of the miraculous Electric Girl had made its way to the lecture halls of Paris. There, a formal committee of academics wanted to verify what the previous doctors had seen. And so Angelique and her parents packed their bags, left their small town and headed for the capital. That was it. Once and for all, the world would learn what a marvel Angelique really was, vouched for by some of the most respected thinkers in France. Now, I have to say that this committee wasn't easy on her. Angelique was pushed and prodded to complete exhaustion. And for a while, their efforts actually worked. Like in one experiment, when Angelique sat down next to a scientist on a heavy sofa only for the whole thing to fly with great force against a wall. Impressive, no doubt about it. But then came the frog incident. In an experiment that probably wouldn't pass ethics codes today, the committee men skinned a laboratory frog, put its slimy flay corpse on the child's arm and fed an electric current through it. Why? Well, I have no idea. But the dead frog twitched and naturally, Angelique was totally terrified by it. She wouldn't stop talking about it and had nightmares about frogs for days. Now, remember, when Angelique became frightened or exhausted, her powers seemed to fade. And she certainly had been driven to both of these situations. She was only a small town kid, after all. And here she was in the big city, forced to be a guinea pig for some of the most powerful men in. In France. Suddenly, the tests began to go a little differently. That is, her electricity stopped. No sparks, no repelling, no vibrations. It was possible that the stress had made her powers disappear. Or perhaps they had never been there at all. Whatever the case may be, the committee came to believe that Angelique was nothing more than a fraud. And who knows? Maybe she was. Because after returning home to Beauvigny, 10 weeks out from that fateful day with the shaking loom that started it all, all the electrical girl's electricity was gone for good. Electricity is all around us. It lights up our homes. It sends signals through our bodies. Heck, it's powering the device you're using to listen to my voice right now. But if I were to ask you specific how it all works, would you be able to tell me. We can look to the Zeuses and Thunderbirds of the past and scoff, but really, today's average person doesn't understand much beyond the flick of a switch. And the truth is, we don't know how Caroline, the Canadian girl from the 1870s, zapped knives into her hands. We don't know how Jenny Moran ended up electrifying a cat, nor what exactly went on in that German law office back in the 1960s. And yes, we still to this day have no idea what the heck was going on with the Electric Girl from Boveny. Perhaps the Parisian committee was right and it was all a hoax. Maybe Angelique was just a bored, very clever teenage girl tired of weaving gloves and eager for a little excitement. One researcher did happen to note, though, and I quote, a double movement on the part of the girl. A movement first in the direction of the object being thrown and afterwards away from it. The first movement being so rapid that it generally escaped detection. Was Angelique subtly shoving objects away and making it look like magic? It is a convenient explanation, I will fully admit that. Except, well, I should probably mention another of the experiments that were conducted on this tiny 14 year old French girl. You see, at one point, three full grown men sat on a 150 pound block of wood. Wood. And as soon as the hem of Angelique's dress brushed against it, the entire thing, men and all, hovered into the air. And yeah, that one's a lot harder to explain away with a simple push. But let's, for the sake of argument, ask if it could be real. Could her abilities have had something to do with those wild thunderstorms that were plaguing Bovigny the week it all began? Or did Angelique possess some kind of telekinesis? At the end of the day, we may never know the truth. Whether the Electric Girl of Boveny was the phenomenon she claimed to be, or if she was just a poor girl dreaming of bright electric life. Either way, one thing is for sure, her story is certainly magnetic. I hope today's stories of thunder gods and magnetic girls have sparked your imagination. After all, what can be more mysterious than an invisible force humming in the very air? Now, it's strange enough when an electrical anomaly affects a single person, but what happens when it buzzes through an entire community? I have one last story for you today that answers that question. Stick around through this brief sponsor break to hear all about it. This episode was made possible by Quince. One thing I love about summer is how easy everything feels. The days are a little more relaxed and I find myself reaching for the same comfortable go anywhere pieces again and again. That's why I keep coming back to Quints. They focus on well made essentials that naturally become those everyday staples you actually live in all season long. Quince's 100% European linen pants and shirts are breathable, easy to throw on, and the summer upgrade you'll rotate needs starting at just $34. Their tees are soft enough to live in all day and the lightweight cotton sweaters are exactly what you want. When summer nights cool down, I wear one of their Flokknit Breeze performance tees just about every single day. I have them in a bunch of colors. And by colors I mean black, gray and white. Cause that's my palette and they never let me down. Everything at Quint's is priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. They work directly with ethical factories and cut out the middlemen. So you're paying for quality, not brand market. Quint goes way beyond clothing too. Custom upholstered sofas, ceramic cookware, premium bedding. It's the kind of brand you end up recommending to everyone for everything make your summer wardrobe easier. Go to quince.com lore for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's Q-U-I-N C-E.com lore for free shipping and 365 day return. Quints.com lore this episode was made possible by Gusto. When you run a small business, you don't just do the job. You're also the hiring manager, the payroll department, and the benefits team. Usually all before lunch. Gusto takes a few of those off your plate quickly and seamlessly. When I started Grim and Mild over six years ago, I learned that lesson very quickly. Yes, I wanted to produce podcasts, but all of a sudden I needed to handle payroll taxes, benefits for my team and all the HR stuff that you never expect. But Gusto saved me taking care of all those tasks so that I could do what I love. Six years later, I can't imagine running my business without them. Gusto is online payroll and benefits software built for small businesses. It's all in one remote, friendly and incredibly easy to use so you can pay, hire onboard and support your team from anywhere. They offer automatic payroll tax filing, simple direct deposits, health benefits, commuter benefits, workers comp, 401k and more. Gusto has unlimited payroll runs for one monthly premium price. No hidden fees, no surprises. Maybe that's why Gusto is ranked number one on G2's highest satisfaction products list for 2026 and trusted by over 400,000 small businesses. Try Gusto today@gusto.com lore and get three months free when you run your first payroll. That's three months of free payroll@gusto.com lore One more time Gusto.com lore this episode of Lore was made possible by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home and auto policies. Try it@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. We talk about mental health a lot more openly these days, which is definitely a good thing. But asking for help can still feel hard, and BetterHelp's latest research confirms it. BetterHelp's 2026 State of Stigma report surveyed 2,000Americans and revealed that 85% of Americans believe getting support is wise, yet 74% say society discourages people from doing so. Those numbers highlight the problem, don't they? There seems to be a gap between believing in mental health support and actually seeking it out, a gap that we should be working hard to close. And that's where BetterHelp comes in. BetterHelp does the initial matching work for you so you can focus on your therapy goals. A short questionnaire helps identify your needs and preferences and their industry leading match fulfillment rate means they typically get it right the first time. And with over 30,000 therapists, BetterHelp is the world's largest online therapy platform, having served over6.6 million people globally. And it works too, with an average rating of 4.9 out of 5 for a live session based on over 1.7 million client reviews. Don't let stigma stand in the way of support. Start therapy with BetterHelp. Sign up and get 10% off@betterhelp.com lore that's betterhelp.com lore. They call it Little Siberia, and it's easy to see why. A remote, high security prison in the upstate New York village of Dannemora, the Clinton Correctional Facility feels like it's on the edge of the world world. The sort of place where a person might vanish entirely. First built in the mid-1800s, the prison has a long and storied history. Most famously, it was the site of a prison break in 2015 where two inmates incarcerated for murder escaped like something out of a Hollywood movie. And speaking of Hollywood, the prison has held a number of big names inside its walls over the years. Everyone from beat poet Gregory Corso and rapper Tupac Shakur and Winston Mosley, the man who murdered Kitty Genovese. But today's story goes back a little further than that. A century ago, in fact, to the year 1920. Because, you see, before Clinton prison was known for its jailbreaks and celebrity inmates, it became famous for a little electrical problem. It went like. In February of 1920, 32 inmates fell ill in rapid succession. But this was no ordinary flu. The prisoners struggled to balance and walk. They had difficulty speaking and had problem with fine motor skills. Even their eyelids drooped severely, impairing their vision. But it was another symptom that left everyone absolutely bewildered. You see, when a doctor was called in to examine the sick, he watched as one man, lying in bed in the prison hospital, balled up a piece of paper in his hands and attempted to toss it into a wastebasket. A simple enough task, right? But the paper absolutely refused to leave the man's hand. Hand. It just stuck to him as if it was glued to his skin. Fascinated, the doctor began conducting experiments. He found that when patients rubbed their hands together, they appeared to generate an electric charge. They were able to make a newspaper so staticky that it could stick to a wall. They could cause a light bulb filament to vibrate and spark, rotate a compass needle and move a hanging steel tape without ever touching it. And apparently, if you passed a hand over the men's hair, it would snap and crackle like a mouthful of pop rocks. The doctor knew that it sounded crazy, but he had no doubt his patients had developed what he called, and I quote, a peculiar static electric power. The affected men were dubbed human magnets, Living storage batteries literally impregnated with static electricity. But let me be clear here. This case wasn't like others that we've heard today. The cause was no great mystery. It didn't stem from a lightning strike or psychokinesis. No, the men had become electrified from eating salmon. Yes, you heard that right. Salmon. You see, while the doctor had never seen anything like their electrical symptoms before, he had seen their other symptoms, that is, the poor balance and muscular problem. And the diagnosis was easy. All 32 men were clearly suffering from botulism. The cause? Eating canned salmon. Now for a little botulism refresher. This is a rare, sometimes fatal neurotoxin created by the same bacteria that's used to make Botox. It attacks the nervous system, preventing muscles from functioning properly. Hence all those muscular symptoms that the inmates were experiencing. And while foodborne botulism is usually the result of improperly preventing preparing home canned food, it sometimes shows up in commercially prepared foods as well. Foods like the canned salmon very unfortunately being served to the inmates of the Clinton prison. Now, I know what you're thinking. Killing you is one thing, but I'm pretty sure that botulism doesn't make you electric. And yeah, you'd be right at least. It's certainly not a known symptom. But the doctor there at the Clinton prison simply couldn't deny the correlation. All of the men who had botuled botulism displayed electrical symptoms. No one else at the prison did. The men who were sickest from botulism had the highest electrical charge, and as they recovered, their electrical powers waned and vanished as well. It may not have made sense, but there you have it. Somehow botulism had electrified the inmates. And no science still has absolutely no idea how this happened. And it's never been reported since. Today, foodborne botulism is rare, with fewer than 20 cases noted per year. But of those who do end up with it, many are, coincidentally incarcerated. It's not due to salmon anymore, though. No. The modern link between botulism and prisons is because a homemade prison brewed alcohol known as pruno happens to be one of the leading carriers of the toxin. Over the past few decades, pruno induced botulism outbreaks breaks have occurred in prisons in Mississippi, California, Arizona, and Utah. And before you ask, no, none of the reports from those other cases mention any strange electrical symptoms. The Clinton prison incident stands alone. But then again, who knows? Maybe it isn't only people being locked away behind those heavy prison walls, but a truly electrifying secret. This episode of Lore was produced by me, Erin Manke, with writing by Jenna Rose Nethercott, research by Cassandra d', Alba, and music by Chad Lawson. Just a reminder, I have a brand new, very weird history book coming out on August 4th. It's called Exhumed, and it explores the roots of the New England vampire page Titanic and the story of Mercy Brown through the lens of folklore, medical advancements and pseudoscience. It's available for pre order right now, and if you pre order the hardcover, there's a webpage where you can submit your receipts and get a free tote bag with some gorgeous artwork from the book on it. Head over to aaronmanke.comexhumed to lock in your copy today. I'll put a link in the description for this episode. Don't like hearing ads on Lore? Well, there's a paid version on Apple Podcasts and patreon patreon that is 100% ad free. Subscribers there also get weekly mini bonus episodes called Lore Bytes and Patreon. Members specifically get discounts on Lore Merch and access to my inbox. Learn more about how you can support the show over@lorepodcast.com support. You can also follow this show on places like YouTube, Threads, Bluesky and Instagram. Just search for lore podcast all one word and then click that follow button. And when you do do say hi. I like it when people say hi. And as always, thanks for listening. 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