A (0:00)

Hey, I'm Ryan Reynolds. At Mintmobile, we like to do the opposite of what big wireless does. They charge you a lot, we charge you a little. So naturally, when they announced they'd be raising their prices due to inflation, we decided to deflate our prices due to not hating you. That's right. We're cutting the price of mint unlimited from $30 a month to just $15 a month. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch $45 upfront.

B (0:24)

Payment equivalent to $15 per month New customers on first three month plan only Taxes and fees Extra Speed slower above.

C (0:29)

40Gb Details this episode is brought to.

D (0:32)

You by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible financial geniuses, monetary magicians. These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Visit progressive.com to see if you could save Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations.

C (0:56)

Foreign hello and welcome to My Victorian Nightmare. I'm your host, Genevieve Mannion, and I'm here to talk about mysterious deaths, morbid fascinations, disturbing stories, and otherwise spooky events from the Victorian era. Because to me, there's just something especially intriguing, creepy and oddly comforting about horror and mayhem from the 19th century. So listener discretion is advised. Hello friends, and welcome to this, my 30th episode. Before we get to anything else, they got Jack the Ripper. I'm recording this on Friday the 14th. Happy Valentine's Day, everybody. And a listener sent the news to me this morning that they caught Jack the ripper. Aaron Kosminski, 100% DNA match. Thanks to historian Russell Edwards and a descendant of Kosminski's who offered her DNA, they pulled a 100% match off the bloody shawl that belonged to Catherine Eddowes. I have honestly been avoiding doing a Jack the Ripper episode because frankly, I hate cold cases. I hate hearing about them. Few things make me more sad. So I never really had a great interest in the Ripper case because I thought, like most people, he could never be found. But they found him. And between now and next Monday, I will be doing little else than constructing the most thorough episode that I can on the Ripper for the following week. So this is really heavy for me for some reason. I know we have a Leo full moon and I do have pms, but I am finding it really hard to hold it together about this. I can't stop thinking about those women. I say I haven't dug deep into the Ripper case, but I still know like a good deal about it. Just not as much as like other topics that I like to obsess over. But I cannot stop seeing those women in my mind. All of those horrible photos in the illustrations in the police news. If you live close to where any of them are buried in the City of London Cemetery, Mary Nichols and Catherine Eddowes are there, Annie Chapman is in the Manor Park Cemetery, Mary Kelly is in St. Patrick's Cemetery, and Elizabeth Stride is in East London Cemetery. If you live close to any of these places, will you bring a flower for me? They got em ladies. Catherine, you got him. Forensic scientists to me are real world superheroes. They literally catch monsters. Thank you Russell Edwards. You are a superhero. Okay, more on all of this next week if I survive. Because I have no doubt I will barely be sleeping until then. Okay, for now we are gonna put that in a bubble and let it fly away for now so I can focus on today's episode, which is simply horrible and fascinating and spooky and grisly and a little bit sexy. Or at least it is to me. But that's because I find things like chandeliers made of skeletons sexy. Perhaps you feel the same. On today's episode I will be discussing the very macabre ways in which French Victorians would entertain themselves. I will be discussing the death themed cabarets, the horror shows in old gothic chapels, and the very upsetting and morbid curiosities that Parisians would literally trample over each other to get a glimpse of. But first, I'm going to weave some haunted housekeeping into something simply delightful. I need to read for you an email that I got from a listener that brings me so much joy. It's getting to the point where I can't respond to every email, which I am so sorry for, but this one really stuck out to me. I love that my listenership is so diverse in age. Most of my listeners are in the 28 to 44 group. I've got a couple in the 2327 group too, a couple of Gen Z goths. But I also have a considerable number in the 45 to 60 plus category Spooky Boomers. And I want to share this email that I got from a lady named Barbara who describes herself as such. This is what she writes. I'm a very old lady who loves your podcast and I will tell you why it fills me with nostalgia. Because when I was a child, most of my relatives were born before 1900. I grew up in a gabled house with coffins in the parlor, braided hair, flowers under glass domes, and beautiful photographs of dead people. My great aunts all wore cameos, garnets and jet jewelry in mourning for who knows who. They spoke of the Civil War, referred to as the recent unpleasantness, as if it were current. We picnicked in the dang cemetery. Many Victorian customs, as you've described, lasted at least until the 50s because they were just what our family did, how we lived. Your recounting these customs and way of thinking makes me smile sometimes laugh sometimes fill me with useless longing. I nod a lot with recognition. Thank you so much for all of that. As I approach my own inevitable death and she comes as a friend. Your podcast brings me comfort in that way too. Thank you for that as well. I never miss an episode. End quote. Here's to you, Barbara. My heart. Thank you for that. I promise I will not be crying through this whole episode. I am just. I am just so overwhelmed with the ways that this show has connected me to such fascinating and beautiful people. What a special community that you are. And although I may not be able to respond to every email, hopefully I will have an assistant in the near future. You can always email me@myvictorianightmaremail.com you can send messages through Instagram yvictoriannightmare. I'm still getting used to Blue Sky. I never used Twitter, so the interface is a little foreign to me, but you can find me there as well. You can go to myvictoriannightmare.com to find my Patreon, where you can receive the show ad free. And sadly, but not so sadly, I will be winding down my other podcast, Dark Poetry, because I have some very exciting things happening with this show and I'm going to need to focus all of my energy here. I think I may still leave those episodes there for like, posterity though, and perhaps even from time to time I will include them as minisodes here. But I will have to see. I'm as you know, an insane person and I've never been able to do just one thing. I've got too many ants in my pants. But I'm going to force myself to focus on this here podcast and only this here podcast because, and I don't want to jinx anything, but it's quickly becoming my career. I am truly overwhelmed with how you have helped me grow and continue to help me grow by rating the podcast on Apple Podcasts and on Spotify, you're making my sweetest dreams and most exciting nightmares come true. A lot is happening and I'm gonna puke. It's also exciting so Anyway, as I was saying, today's episode is all about spooky French Victorian entertainment and I must apologize in advance for butchering the language. I promise I will do my very best, but my French is limited to the aliases that I use to refer to my little Pomeranian, Toby, who is otherw known as simply Monsieur, sometimes Mon petit, although in more aristocratic company he is referred to as Le Chevalier du Choux a la creme, Sir Cream puff, as it were. So please forgive me and I found something special that I want to share with you real quick before we get to the meat of the episode, the bouff, so to speak. It's a tiny little article that I found from the Illustrated Police News that is French entertainment themed, it is precious and it is called A Drunken Oyster at a Masquerade Ball and it reads, at a recent masked ball in Paris there was seen moving around an enormous oyster with two gaiters at the bottom and a domino covered with seaweed at the top. Behind this oyster moved an enormous gendarme, booted and with an immense three cornered hat who was trying to open the oyster with his saber. Occasionally he succeeded and there could be seen a woman in flesh coloured webbing and with nothing else on but a pearl collar and who hurriedly shut her shell with a scared look. The oyster made a great hit which she moistened with too much champagne so that on leaving the opera she found it necessary to come out of her shell and began a wild dance which the police found trifling. Finally, this pearl oyster went to sleep at the police station, which I doubt that last part and perhaps the entire article, but certainly that last part. And you are about to find out why. In short, the Victorian French didn't clutch the pearls quite so easily as the English or Americans. Okay? And this is important, if you find yourself to be a bit squeamish, you got the squeams. The first half of the episode might be a bit intense, but don't worry, if you're here for more intriguing dark and spookies than say, corpsey creepy eepies, you will find that in the later half of the show. But no matter what you are here for, you're still going to learn a lot of really fascinating information that you cannot tell any of your co workers or anyone at parties. Sadly, they won't get it. I promise. No matter how neat and fun. Some of the terrible things that I am going to tell you today are just take my advice. Your co workers, your friends and especially your family will not want to hear any of this. Unless you have other creeps in your life like I am lucky enough to have. My friend Kabir is going to get an earful of Victorian murder theater facts the next time I see him, but he's just about the only person I can tell these things to. And Chrissy, She's a monster. I can't get over how much I love my friends. Okay, let's begin. My main references for today are a long forgotten hauntedmansion blogspot article amazing, a daily.jstor.org article by Amelius Soth, and an Atlas Obscura article by Michael Waters. All of my other references can be found in the show Notes by the end of the 19th century in France, which form of entertainment do you believe was one of the very most popular? Was it the many circuses of Paris, the art exhibitions, cabarets, or the Folies Bergres that was the Parisian music hall noted for its lavish spectacles and risque performances? It was actually none of the above. The answer is the morgue French people found disturbing the bloomers off themselves down the local morgue to be one of the very most enthralling forms of entertainment in not just Paris, but all over the country. Morgues were open to the public for the purpose that friends and loved ones could come to see or identify bodies. But few visitors ever came for this purpose, and in fact the layout of the Paris morgue was very much intended as an exhibition. Bodies weren't discreetly covered with sheets or kept out of view to preserve their dignity. Bodies were laid out on slabs behind glass in two rows in the style of like a natural history museum of cadavers for folks to walk through and gawk at. Their clothes were hung on hooks above them. They lay naked side by side. Although many morgues were popular attractions, none rivaled the Paris morgue when it was rebuilt in 1864. City planners designed it as an attraction not for the purpose of entertainment, but for the ease of crowds to come and hopefully more quickly identify the dead. It was centrally placed right behind the Cathedral of Notre Dame and open from early morning to dusk seven days a week. It was designed to be inviting. The exhibition room could hold 50 people at a time. There were large green curtains that hung in the corners, likely dyed with arsenic at the time, which really ties the whole scene together for me. I saw a quote comparing the space to a department store window showing off its most prized merchandise. In earlier years, cold water would drip from the ceiling to slow decomposition of the bodies, but in 1880 a refrigeration system was Instituted to keep the bodies from decomposing more rapidly. Which answers a question that I had in the very first episode. I couldn't find exactly when refrigeration was officially beginning to be used in morgues to help slow decomposition. I am learning so much fascinating and revolting information that I can never share in most places or I will be asking to leave. Thank God I can tell you guys and Kabir and Chrissy these God awful things, okay? The displays of corpses were often compared to the theater. French novelist Emily Zola called it a show that was affordable to all. From time to time, there would be no bodies on display and crowds would react angrily. Like when the lion at the zoo hides behind a bush behind the glass. The novelist said that when no bodies were on display, the crowds complained that death allowed itself an intermission that day without thinking of their good pleasure. But the morgue was more than just a theater of death. Spectators could also enjoy, like a twisted episode of Law and Order. Police would often drag suspected killers by the scruff of their necks down to view their victims in hopes of shocking them into giving confessions. This was done so commonly that special electric lights were installed to brightly illuminate the bodies before the suspects so that they would see more clearly what they were believed to have done and confess. And there are a number of instances where this tactic worked. Some police records show that a number of people confessed upon being forced to visit victims in the morgue. This also served as a no doubt very dramatic and almost theatrical spectacle for the people lucky enough to catch one of these confrontations while they were there. Which is a horrifying thing to think about. People simply suspected of being killers being dragged into a public exhibition of brightly lit murder victims while onlookers no doubt shouted and demanded a confession while they're being brought face to face with murder victims that they may have never even seen before. Can you imagine this? That is just inconceivable to imagine. Although I kind of want to see it as a scene in a horror movie. Just saying. Apart from these dramatically shocking and gruesome encounters between murder suspects and their suspected victims, there was more macabre drama literally staged for onlookers to enjoy. Sensationalist grotesque yellow journalism wasn't just for Brits and Americans. The French loved their blood soaked tabloids too. And often victims of hideous murders, decapitated, unknown bodies found floating in the Seine river, or even evidence found at the scenes of crimes. Bloodied knives or trunks where bodies were found would quickly be put on display in the morgue awaiting the thousands of people who would pack into the exhibition hall to catch a glimpse for themselves. A USC history professor, Vanessa R. Schwartz, notes an example that in 1895, a French daily newspaper reported that the dead body of an 18 month old child had been pulled out of the river, and the very next day another 3 year old child was found nearby. The paper, capitalizing on this horrifying tragedy, ran an article asking, are these two sisters stirring up speculation and excitement, encouraging the crowds to go see for themselves, creating a story that they can inevitably revisit in future editions that many thousands of people who rushed to the morgue to see for themselves would be desperate to read. So many people rushed to see these two little girls on display at the morgue that the police were dispatched to disperse the crowds. In the newspaper Les Journales Irresistree, which again, I apologize for my French, there was a story about a four year old little girl that had been found dead with only a small bruise on her hand. Readers of the paper rushed to the morgue to try to identify her or solve the mystery themselves. They pushed through the exhibition hall to see the corpse of this little girl, who was at least clothed in a tiny dress. She was posed in a chair that was covered in a red cloth to bring out her paleness. After this one report, 50,000 innocent people were said to have stormed the morgue to see her. After a few more papers ran the story of the unidentified girl, crowds at the morgue grew so massive that they spilled out into the streets. Vendors gathered outside to hawk coconut, gingerbread and toys. Traffic stopped, fights broke out, and another newspaper described all of this disorder as such. The mob rushes the doors with savage cries. Fallen hats are tromped on, parasols and umbrellas are broken. And yesterday women fell sick, having been half suffocated. Over 150,000 people were estimated to have filed past the body each night. She would remain strapped to that red chair and would be placed in a refrigerator to preserve her as long as possible. After a few days, though, she began to decompose visibly, so an autopsy was finally done. It was determined that she had died after swallowing an earthworm. Crowds that had gathered online that day were furious when she was removed from her display for the autopsy before they could get a glimpse. It's unclear if the little girl was ever identified.