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Hello and welcome to My Victorian Nightmare. I'm your host, Genevieve Manion, 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 86th episode. I hope that you are being extra kind to yourselves lately, giving yourself all of the grace, eating whatever you want to eat, watching your favorite horror comfort movies on repeat. I think we all deserve a break. I really hope that you're giving one to yourself today. For you, dear listener, I have a creepy, spooky hodgepodge episode I'm going to discuss not one, not two, but three different topics that are all creepy for different reasons. The Kentucky meat shower of 1876, the Dagg family poltergeist of 1889, and what was up with 1837's most terrifying public menace, Spring Healed Jack. But first, thank you to Cielo, Midori, Maren, Ellie, Rachel, Sue, Magda, Nicholas and Michael for subscribing to the Patreon this week. You and everyone who has joined are the reason why my show can continue. So thank you. And I have just enabled a one week free trial, so if you would like to get a little sample of the Victorian True crime extras or the Fan Coven content, you can get a little appetizer first to see if you would like to officially really join. Just go to myvictorianightmare.com to find out how. And I need to say thank you to those of you who continue to leave me comments and those of you who have rated the show. I love your comments and messages so much. So please continue to leave them. And if you haven't already, please rate the show on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. 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I've replaced a lot of my dry flower arrangements in my home. I have new, fresh dead flowers covering every surface. I made Toby healthy homemade treats in the shapes of hearts, which he very much enjoys. And I have been deeply listening to music. I was listening to Dvorak's Romance in F minor. And there's a melody around the three minute mark that is just so hauntingly beautiful. And I decided to do a little research to see what was going on in that man's life when he wrote this beautiful, beautiful thing. The Panic of 1883, a massive financial crash that caused a long depression all across Europe. The Franco Prussian War had just two years earlier already reshaped Europe. So he was dealing with massive instability and of course, many horrifying illnesses, pandemics, killing his family and his friends all around him. The world was crumbling around his ears. So to add another reason why I look to the Victorian era for inspiration, another reason why I have so much affection for this period in history and everyone in it. Despite all of their instability and horror, they too turned to beauty and creation. They found it in themselves to Let their lights shine through the darkness. And oh, how they turned to creepy, eepy things to comfort them in their dark times. Some of Dvorak's music is rather haunting. His cantata the Specter's Bride tells a gothic story of a dead lover returning to lure a woman into the grave. I feel I have so much in common with these sorts of folks. So that's a long winded way of saying don't stop creating beautiful things right now in these dark times and do not stop creeping yourself out. There is a lot of comfort to be found in creeping. And with that, allow me to regale you with details about what had come to be known as the Kentucky meat shower of 1876. The Kentucky meat shower of 1876 was and is still considered to be a mysterious incident. In short, several minutes between 11am and 12 noon on March 3, 1876, out of the blue sky above, chunks of mystery meat began to fall and contain continued to fall from the sky just over a particular area that measured about 150 yards. An area near Olympia Springs in Bath County, Kentucky. On that fateful day, a farmer's wife named Rebecca Crouch was making soap on her porch. And then all of a sudden a chunk of meat plopped down from the sky just about 40 steps or so away from her. She was like, is that a chunk of beef in my gardenias? So she got up to investigate and bless her, she ran to her husband, showed it to him, and they both agreed this was a sign from God. It is not clear exactly what kind of sign they interpreted it to be of, but perhaps that's because by the time they no doubt began trying to interpret what God was trying to say with this hunk of sky meat, it began, quote unquote, snowing meat. To quote Mrs. Crouch, she also said the meat fell with a snapping like no when it struck crumbs and carrots. The meat also fell upon the property of a grocer who said that it smelled like that of a dead body. Most of the pieces were about 2 by 2 inches, and at least one piece was about 4 by 4 inches. Some folks offered up their cast iron stomachs to taste the meat, to try to identify it. At first it was believed to be beef, but two discerning gentlemen disagreed. They thought it could be lamb or must have had a gaminess to it. But one guy, a scientist, believed it to not be meat at all. But get this, something called Nostoc. And this is what that is. Nostoc, also known as star jelly, trolls, butter Spit of the moon, fallen star, witch's butter or witch's jelly, which is a kind of bacteria found in a variety of both aquatic and terrestrial environments that may form colonies composed of filaments and monoform cell, a gelatinous sheath of polysaccharides. It looks like goopy, gloppy seaweed. This was just a theory, though again, this wasn't proven. The sky meat was handed over to scientific organizations and colleges to test. One scientist believed that it was lung tissue from either a horse or human infants. To quote him, he said the structure of the organ in these two cases being almost identical. As he wrote in the medical record. More studies done by his colleagues made similar identifications, but also added that it may be muscle or perhaps cartilage. There was a humorist from the New York Times who called it cosmic meat and wrote that it must have come from a planet made of meat that likely exploded in a galaxy far, far away, because he was a silly goose. But there were more plausible theories about where it could have come from. The most widely held theory by locals was that it was essentially puke from turkey vultures. And this was backed up by a scientist and animal behaviorist named Dr. Louis D. Kastenbein, who said of turkey vultures, quote, as is their custom, seeing one of their companions disgorge himself immediately follow suit. That's a polite way of saying, watching their friends puke makes them puke just like us. But unlike us, they also can do this as a defense method when threatened, which has always been a skill I have wished to learn. What better way to escape pretty much any situation you don't want to be in? I will master this skill one day. There was also a theory that this was blood rain, which was not likely, but I'll explain what it is, because this incident is like a pomegranate of weird and wacky facts to share with unsuspecting family members at Thanksgiving. It's just so wonderful. Blood rain is a phenomenon that scientists attribute to different kinds of particles that get kicked up into the atmosphere and rain down like green microalgae that appears as red and red dust from deserts that can travel very far and rain down in random areas. Blood rain events have been chronicled all the way back to Greek mythology. Of course, supernatural explanations or religious explanations have been given, but again, when the events are investigated by scientific methods, they appear to be caused by algae or red desert dust. So this is not what happened here. Blood rain doesn't come down in chunks that I have read to this day, no one knows what on earth was the actual cause. And even though a sample of the meat was preserved in alcohol and rediscovered at Transylvania University, which is not in Transylvania, it's in Kentucky, that's just a ticklesome detail to me. It has not been able to be accurately identified as any particular species due to its age and condition of the sample. So it remains the mystery meat shower of 1876. And now let us have a segment we have come to call with their own eyes where we discuss the personal haunting accounts of petrified Victorians. I haven't done this segment in a few episodes. I'm going to pepper it in when I find particularly spooky haunting accounts. I was doing this segment every episode for a while, but now I want it to be more special, a spooky delicacy. And I found a really interesting one that I hadn't heard of before. Have you ever heard of the Dagg family poltergeist? This one is particularly creepy for a number of reasons. In 1889, a farmer lived with his wife and three children in Quebec. They decided to take in a little orphaned girl named Dinah from the uk. Orphans from the United Kingdom at this time were often shipped off to the US and Canada to help on farms. As soon as she arrived, arrived, strange, unexplained and very upsetting things began to occur in the house. Things like spontaneous fires, objects flying around the property like water jugs, butter tubs and wash basins. Heavy, dangerous things. Stones would be thrown through their windows. Rocking chairs would rock all on their own. And instruments would play on their own as well. I read a detail about a harmonica playing all on its own. I wonder if it just like made noise or if it was played skillfully. Like, was it a Beck style harmonica playing or just like when you put a harmonica in a dog's lips. That's the funniest game to play with your dog, by the way. Anyway, the family and neighbors claimed to hear the sound of an old gruff voice like an old man in and around the house. Outside too. The voice wasn't just mumbling and grumbling, though, it would answer questions. Now, there are all kinds of haunting stories, urban legends like this that don't have real sources. But the thing that's interesting about this particular demonic, haunting story is that it was documented in newspapers. And not just one or two articles, but many ongoing stories. There are so many witnesses outside of the family that had experiences with this alleged demon that signed statements to their experiences, including clergy. And this is the most disturbing detail One of their own children, four year old Eliza Jane, mysteriously died only three weeks after the disturbances began. Now I wasn't able to verify this with a death certificate, but it's said that she burned to death while playing near a cauldron of soap in the Ottawa Citizen newspaper from 1857. That's obviously not an official account. It's a News article written 70 years later. And it's likely the information was based off of what local folks claimed. But like I said, there is no official death certificate for this little girl. But she did die. She was buried in Portage du Fort Cemetery. She died on the 9th of October, 1889. So that's not a myth. This little girl did die. It's just not exactly clear how. The very first instance of the haunting was mentioned in The Philadelphia Inquire, January 13, 1890. This was written about three months after the little girl died. The family had a young farmhand, a young boy named, named Dean, who found a five dollar bill on the ground beside the stove. Like an honest lad, he brought it to Mr. Dagg and told him where he found it. But Mr. Dagg had given it to his wife the day before and she put it in a bureau drawer. They checked the drawer and more money that had been placed there was missing. They checked his bed and found the other dollar bills under the mattress and accused him of being a thief. But he swore he didn't take it. He wasn't fired, but it appears that the boy left the house after. But then other weird things started happening. Things that seemed to imply mischievousness. Milk pans would be poured out on the floor. Butter would be found all over the countertops. Then a window was smashed in a bedroom. Mr. Dagg's father was staying at the house while George the farmer was away. And as soon as it happened, they assumed someone threw a rock through the window. So he ran outside to catch who did it. But when he got outside, no one was there. But rocks continued to break the windows right in front of him while he watched again with no one around. Creepiness aside, it occurred to them that young Dean, the boy who originally found that $5 bill, who they accused of stealing, who left the house. Maybe he was up to all of this. Maybe he held a grudge. So they tracked him down. He was working for another family now, far too far away in Litchfield to be doing any of this. The family he worked for gave him a solid alibi. He hadn't left their proper since he got there. He couldn't have scuttled back to butter their countertops and smash their windows on the regular, which was continuing to happen. So that theory fell apart after the window smashing incident. And this is surprising. George's father decided to move in with them and bring his wife with him to help with the family because they were all starting to get extremely freaked out. This hall reminds me of the Milhouse haunting episode that I did with sightings where despite how horrifying things got, people just kept moving in in coming to stay for months at a time while their beds were being pushed up with the backs of ghosts under them, allegedly. So the grandfather and the grandmother moved in to help out and things just started getting more horrifying. One day, allegedly, as it's written in the Philadelphia Inquirer, the grandmother was tidying up and the little adopted girl, Dinah, said, oh, grandmother, see the big black thing pulling off the bedclothes? She turned to see and didn't see anything other than the clothes lifting off of the bed into the air. The woman said, I don't see anyone. What do you see? And the little girl said, quote, why don't you see him? He is jumping over the bed frame. End quote. The woman picked up what is described as a whipstock and handed it to the little 11 year old girl and told her to attack. And the article says Dinah was afraid, but the old lady got behind her and admonished her to have no fear but to strike. Lustily, Dinah plucked up heart and struck at the monster that was only visible to her eye. Thanks, Grandma. She stood behind the little girl and was like, get him. Sheesh, Grandma. A neighbor ran in after hearing the screaming from next door. He ran over to help. He ran into the room and the old lady said, there's an invisible, invisible demon in here that only Dinah can see. And he also encouraged the little girl to swing away. Now this is where a witch got involved. A woman locally known as, and I wish this was how I was locally known, the witch of Plum Hollow. She was a local woman who was long credited with supernatural powers in the area. George Dagg asked this woman to come to the house. The woman performed a seance and she accused the a neighbor woman of being an evil witch and that she was performing black magic with her two children on their house. But this woman happily came over to their house and was like, that witch is full of it. We have no beef. And they threw the witch of Plumhollow out of the house. So that was a dead end. By now, stories were swirling about the house and the family and a local psychology Student named Percy Woodcock decided to come to the house and ask if he could do an investigation. He believed that there must be some psychological reason for all of this, or at least a scientific reason. He wanted to check it out for himself. And they agreed. He asked if he could speak with Dinah. During the interview, she told him something. She said that she would often speak to a man that she couldn't see out in the barn. And he said, is that so? Well, let's go see if we can speak to him together. Now, all of this, to me, sounds like if the movie the witch, the conjuring insidious and poltergeist had a baby baby, doesn't it? It's likely this story was an inspiration for some of those stories. So he went out with the girl to the barn, and she began speaking. She said, quote, are you there, mister? And this is what's written in another article, quote. To Mr. Woodcock's astonishment, a deep, gruff voice, as of an old man seemingly within four or five feet of him, answered her. The language of the voice was quite unfit for polite ears. It expressed the greatest antipathy to Mr. Woodcock and to the girl, Dinah. He was like, let's go ahead and get the hell out of here. But the voice followed them. It kept speaking to them all the way through the yard and into the house. Mr. Woodcock was like, I don't want to do this anymore. I'm over it. So he busted a move out of there. It was put forth in a paper by someone who had never met the family or talked to Dinah that she. She was a ventriloquist. He was one. So he accused her of being one. Also, there was no comment from Mr. Woodcock about that. It sounds like he ran screaming for the hills after his own encounter and didn't want anything else to do with that family after that. And this is where the fires began. When I worked for a very small business just over a year ago, before I started the show, I was so impressed when my friend who. Who was also my boss, knew how to do all of the things. He got my direct deposit set up, got my health benefits squared away, 401k. 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More and more people were welcomed into the house to check it out and see if they would also experience weird stuff. 17 farmers, community leaders, local politicians and clergymen were invited in and they all signed a statement that they experienced terrifying things in the home. They signed a letter that said that they too asked questions of this old gruff invisible voice and it answered them when Dinah was around and only when she was around ground. So either she was haunted by this demon or a really good ventriloquist. The other children, Mary and Johnny, however, also claimed to see this thing that at first only Dinah claimed to see. They said it had different forms, a tall thin man with a cow's head, horns and cloven feet. At other times it appeared as a big black dog and also a man with a beautiful face and long white hair, dressed in white, wearing a crown of stars. That all sounds so cool. There were no reports of the children being asked to sign their names in any books or if they wanted to live deliciously though, so that's a relief. Now this is where the lack of public records and documentation becomes genuinely concerning. I found an article that claimed that Dinah was returned to an orphanage after the fires began. It's unclear if the family at that point believed that Dinah was cursed, or if they just thought that she was doing everything herself Herself setting fires, throwing her voice, somehow able to throw stones without being seen, buttering countertops, etc. Though I couldn't find any official records of the girl being sent back, there are a few different newspaper articles that say that she was sent to Fairknoe Home in Brockville. This was an orphanage. But the articles are only from years later. There's also a bit of a disturbing article I saw that says something different. Years later, one of the biological children of George Dagg, a now man named, named Thomas, was interviewed about his childhood and the poltergeist experience. And he said that a quote unquote showman came to his father and asked if he could take Dinah a few weeks after the disturbances began. The father said no. But then one day, not that much later, another man came to the house with a letter that was signed by his father, George Dagg, saying that she was to go away with this man. Then, as Thomas says, she was never heard from or seen, seen again. It's not at all clear if this was perhaps someone from the orphanage or just a guy that they sent her away with, which is a horrifying prospect. But she indeed cannot be traced anywhere after this poltergeist event. So this story is pretty scary for a number of reasons. Once Dinah was no longer at the house, wherever she may have gone, the disturbances in the Dagg family home stopped. The family also prospered. The father's farm did very well. He then became mayor of the town and he served until his death in 1838. He served for 16 years. So this wasn't a situation where a family, say, wanted to get famous and profit off the situation. It doesn't appear that they charged anyone who came to experience the spooky happenings. It appears that Dinah was only there for three months before not being heard from or seen ever again. Was this a demon possession? Or was this girl perhaps traumatized by being orphaned in another country, shipped to a whole other country to work on a farm, and maybe believed herself that she was being tormented by unseen things. Regardless, it sounds like that little girl had a very difficult life. I wish that we knew what became of her now. Well before the Mothman or the Boogeyman made their grand entrances on the creepy spooky guy stage, there was another creepy, spooky, spooky guy that wreaked havoc on the streets of London, central England and Scotland in the 1830s. His name was Spring Heeled Jack. And no, he wasn't just an urban legend. He wasn't just a character in Penny dreadfuls. The Spring Heeled Jack penny dreadfuls were inspired by a real guy or guys that terrorized the citizens of Britain and there are some theories about who this guy really was. I will get to that. Although many folks at the time truly believed him to be a stranger, straight up demonic entity roaming the streets at night, attacking mostly women, some claiming that he had claws, some claiming he could leap high over gates, some claiming that his eyes glowed like red coals. Some accounts that you read about Spring Heeled Jack say that the name Spring Heeled Jack only came about years after alleged accounts were made of him, kind of implying that he was nothing but an urban legend and that stories about him were just retellings of accounts allegedly made many years earlier. So they may not have even been true. But I know a thing or two about how to operate a sensationalist newspaper archive and no, this guy or guys were definitely on the loose and reported to be terrorizing women and Men in 1837-1838 papers. And he was already calling himself Spring Heeled Jack in the Essex, Hertz and Kent Mercury from February 27th in an article called Spring Heeled Jack, a woman contacted police after a truly terrifying incident. 18 year old Jane Alsop was at home at 9pm when she heard a loud knocking at the front door. She ran to open it, but first asked who it was before she did. Someone outside said that they were a police officer and needed some light because they had caught Spring Heeled Jack, a man who had already been terrorizing men and women around the neighborhood for the past past month. She grabbed a candle, opened the door and she found a guy in a long black cape with what she said was a quote unquote most hideous and frightful appearance and vomited forth a quantity of blue and white flame from his mouth and his eyes resembled red balls of fire. She said he wore a large helmet and tight fitting white clothes under the cape. He grabbed her and with what she said were metallic claws he started ripping at her dress and skin. She screamed and was able to get away from him, but not before being torn to shreds up and down her back, neck and arms. When she got into the house, her family started calling loudly for police out their windows. The police came and believed him to be someone who again had already been doing similar things to other folks around town over the past few weeks. Similar incidents and descriptions had been made by both men and women women. Another young woman nine days later said that she was walking down an alley to her home when a person in a Large black cape jumped out at her and quote unquote spurted a quantity of blue flame in her face. He burned her face and then just walked off calmly, quote, unquote. He didn't try to attack her any other way. In another instance, a man with a long black cloak, but not with fire breath, began attacking a woman with his claws. She started screaming, so he ran off and jumped in front of a passing carriage, which then caused a coachman to lose control and crash the carriage, severely injuring him. And several witnesses said that they saw the guy jump nine feet over a high wall, cackling as he got away. Many people believed this guy to be a ghost or a devil, like a demon. It's honestly clear and obvious to me that this wasn't just one guy. It just seems like there was an epidemic of weird little dudes who enjoyed the idea of terrorizing women and men in fantastical ways throughout the 1800s, not just the 1830s, there were spring Heeled Jack sightings all the way through 1900. It's kind of ridiculous. Like I'll give you some examples of what they called Spring Heeled Jack incidents. There was one instance where a man was gardening in his home in Sussex when, and this is what he claimed in the newspaper the Times, something appeared to him in the shape of a bear or some other four footed animal. It growled at him and then climbed a tall garden wall and ran along it on all fours before jumping down and chasing the gardener around his property. It then scaled a high wall again and ran off, scaring the man half to death. This was described as a Spring Heeled Jack sighting in the 1870s, 30 years after the first creep went around London attacking people for fun. There was what was called the Peckham Ghost Incident that attributed to Spring Heeled Jack. Three young ladies were preparing to go to church on a particularly dark and foggy morning and when they stepped outside their home, one of them, 13 year old Margaret Carver, claimed to see a tall white ghostly figure with arms outstretched. She said it leapt across the street 20ft from where she stood. This creature character or creepy dude was seen not too much later outside the Honor Oak church where people claimed to see him jump over wall and fences. He was said to be over 6 to 8ft tall and was seen mostly by women and children. Some said that he wore a curly gray haired wig, which is particularly menacing. To me, it was his leaping that made folks make the connection to Spring Heeled Jack. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game well with the name your price tool from Progressive Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills. Try it@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates Price and coverage match Limited by state law not available in all states. There was another Spring Heeled Jack ghost called the Park Ghost who some folks claimed would appear from the grounds of a cholera memorial in Sheffield over a mass grave where 4402 victims of the 1832 epidemic were buried. In 1873, police were called about a ghost terrorizing residents, springing and jumping about the quarry and over the walls and they were like Jack's back. These stories caused such a sensation that people began crowding around the memorial at night to see if they could see the ghost themselves or catch whoever it was. So many people were crowding around that police were called in to control the crowds and and a mini riot at the cholera mass grave memorial broke out. They began throwing rocks at the cops. Two policemen were seriously injured. This Spring Heeled Jack was never captured or seen again after the riot. By the 1870s, after the park Ghost Spring Heeled Jack incident, he kept showing up. But this time he had a new superpower. He could be directly shot at but not be killed. Lincolnshire had their own Jack who was terrorizing people in a sheepskin and an angry mob chased him down and cornered him. Numerous witnesses claimed that he was then shot by a number of people, but he didn't get hit. He just leapt into the air and over a wall. And not too long after this, a regiment barracked at Colchester in the winter of 1878 claimed that a dark figure appeared behind the gates and ran directly at a soldier in the middle of the night. And despite being shot at by another nearby soldier who saw it happen, the dark figure was able to run up to the soldier, slap him acro, slap him across the face twice, and then dashed over the gates with quote unquote astonishing bounds. Now there are theories about who the first Spring Heeled Jack was. All of the other bear sheep leaping cholera monument ghosts I'm sure were just other bored ghosts, creepy dudes. But there is one who is absolutely plausible and one who might have been the first guy to give himself the name Spring Heeled Jack. The first monstrous creep to be written about the guy who must have created a flamethrower mouth apparatus in his mother's basement. He didn't start by doing that. There are other reports from just a month earlier where a guy in a black cape was standing around in the shadows jumping out at women and throwing his cap tape that his mother made for him around them and then punching them in the face before running off. But before he would, he would say, I am Spring Heeled Jack. And the night that that horrifying first flame mouth incident, just after this, a dude went to a bar bragging about being Spring Heeled Jack. His name was Thomas Milbank. The bartender reported him to the police and he was arrested and tried for the assault. He happened to be wearing the same kind of clothes that the woman said that she saw. But get this, he was acquitted because they couldn't prove that he had any chemicals or equipment or ability to breathe fire. And a witness, a person passing by at the time, said that they didn't see the assailant breathe any fire. So that discredited the woman's entire testimony. Obviously, we can't know what really happened, but the fact that another girl was actually burned by some guy with a fire breathing apparatus makes me think that she was telling the truth. The woman witness just didn't see it. But to be fair to the judge, the guy just bragged to be this guy. But he could have been lying. Sadly, there isn't enough information about the case to really know anything. But all we know, at least, is that this one guy literally said that he was the attacker and didn't deny saying it in court. The other plausible, or at least suspected creepy dude was an aristocrat named the Marquis of Waterford, an Irish nobleman. He was actually the main suspect. This guy was frequently in the News in the 1830s for drunken brawling, vandalism, making lewd jokes, playing dangerous pranks, and he had a general contempt for women. It earned him the nickname the Mad Marquis. He also happened to be in London during those strings of nightly attacks, of which there were many. It wasn't just a few people here and there. The Lord Mayor of London had stacks of instances of this guy going around at night terrorizing people, mostly women. Those incidents just didn't all individually make it to the papers. A British lexiconographer who was a friend or acquaintance, not sure if he actually liked the guy, specifically called him out for being Spring Heeled Jack. He said he used to amuse himself by springing on travelers unawares to frighten, frighten them. And from time to time, others have followed his silly example. Once the Mad Marquis left London, those first strings of attacks stopped. He married, he settled in County Waterford, and apparently he stopped being such a jerk by all accounts. Now, of course, there were supernatural explanations for who what this guy was that's why every time a similar case of a guy jumping very high, tormenting people in the streets, evading capture, evading bullets over the course of nearly 70 years would be attributed to Spring Heeled Jack. A lot of people genuinely believed that he was a shape shifting demon of sorts. Some believed that he was accidentally or purposely summoned into the world by folks practicing occult magic. Fortean authors, those being folks who wrote on anomalous and supernatural phenomena like Law, Loren Coleman and Jerome Clark, put Spring Heeled Jack in a category that they called phantom attackers. According to them, phantom attackers appear to be human and may be perceived to be prosaic criminals that display extraordinary abilities like the high jumping, the fact that they can evade capture or death itself. And at first when I read that people, a lot of people honestly believed that this guy was, or likely guys could be anything supernatural, it just sounded crazy. But it occurred to me this was the 1830s. Witch trials were still in the memories of some people who were still alive. And although the spiritualist movement hadn't officially begun until the 1840s in England, it was already being practiced, just not on a mass scale. People really did believe that you could manifest benevolent or mischievous and even dangerous spirits. Many still do. So it isn't that uncanny that folks believed that this fire breathing creep could be more than just an aristocrat with nothing better to do than terrorize people on the streets of London. Regardless whether he was supernatural or human, it sounds like they were correct about him being a creepy demon. If you enjoyed this podcast and would like to hear more, please rate the show on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Leave me comments because you know, I love them so much and join the fan coven to listen ad free and for even more creepy and witchy content. Until next time, be kind to yourselves and I will see you in your nightmares.