CLASSIC: Back When the Rich Ate Corpses

Summary

Podcast Title: Ridiculous History
Host/Author: iHeartPodcasts
Episode: CLASSIC: Back When the Rich Ate Corpses
Release Date: July 3, 2025

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Introduction: Exploring Historical Cannibalism for Medicine

In this classic episode of Ridiculous History, hosts Ben Bowlin and Noel Brown delve into the macabre yet fascinating world of historical cannibalism, particularly focusing on its medicinal uses among the European elite during the Renaissance and beyond.

The Grave Tax and Guanajato’s Sideshow Mummies

The episode opens with a discussion about Guanajato, a city that once imposed a “grave tax.” Ben explains, “If you fell three years behind on your loved one's resting place, they would dig the body up and take it out of the grave” (00:23). This taxation led to the natural mummification of bodies, which subsequently became a gruesome sideshow attraction. Gravediggers capitalized on this by charging people to view these preserved remains, turning death into a public spectacle.

Cannibalism as Medicine: Belief and the Placebo Effect

Ben and Noel explore how cannibalism was not merely an occasional act but a widespread medicinal practice. Noel remarks, “This conversation today is twofold. It's about the power of belief, the placebo effect” (05:27). They discuss how consuming human flesh and blood was believed to transfer vitality and health benefits, a concept driven by sympathetic magic and magical thinking. During the 16th and 17th centuries, particularly in Europe, these practices were considered the pinnacle of medicinal advancement.

Medicinal Practices and Notable Practitioners

The hosts reference Dr. Richard Sugg's book, Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians, highlighting that such practices were not exclusive to the elite but were sought after by the lower classes as well. Ben cites Sugg’s observation: “The question was not so much should we eat human flesh? But what sort of flesh is best to eat” (07:12).

Notable remedies included:

• King’s Drops: Ground human skulls dissolved in alcohol, famously endorsed by King Charles II of England as a cure for ailments ranging from epilepsy to headaches (07:36).
• Human Fat: Applied externally as a poultice for gout, believed to provide therapeutic benefits (08:41).
• Blood Consumption: Drinking blood from individuals who died violent deaths was thought to enhance the potency of the remedy (10:33).

Cultural and Ethical Perspectives

The episode touches on the ethical contradictions of the time. Noel notes the hypocrisy in condemning indigenous ritualistic cannibalism while practicing medical cannibalism themselves. Michel de Montaigne, a French writer, criticized Europeans for this double standard, stating, “You cannot condemn people for practicing one kind of ritualized or spiritual cannibalism while you are happily grinding up mummies and drinking tinctures” (21:22).

Beth Conklin, a cultural and medical anthropologist, is cited to differentiate between European medicinal cannibalism and indigenous ritualistic practices, emphasizing that the former was more pseudo-scientific and less spiritually motivated.

Preparation and Preservation Techniques

Ben provides a detailed account of how human flesh was processed for medicinal use:

“Take blood from persons of warm, moist temperament... Let the corpse lie one day and night in the sun and moon, but the weather must be good. Cut the flesh into pieces and sprinkle it with myrrh and just a little aloe...” (12:12)

These procedures mirrored food preservation techniques, ensuring the flesh did not spoil and was palatable for consumption.

Modern Echoes and Continuing Practices

While the practices discussed are rooted in history, Ben and Noel draw parallels to modern medical practices and ongoing issues:

• Blood Transfusions: Though not cannibalistic, they involve the transfer of blood from one person to another, reminiscent of the historical belief in blood’s healing properties (22:41).
• Modern-Day Cannibalism: The hosts mention contemporary instances in certain African countries where albinism is hunted for magical rituals, highlighting the persistence of such practices (36:20).

Anecdotes: The Mellified Man and Thieves’ Candles

One particularly bizarre remedy discussed is the “mellified man,” a human mummy confection steeped in honey, believed to treat wounds and fractures after a century-long preservation process (24:01). Additionally, the use of “thieves’ candles,” made from human fat to stupefy or paralyze targets, persisted into the 1880s (22:56).

Listener Interaction and Conclusion

The episode concludes with a light-hearted exchange over listener mail, discussing cultural dishes like chebureki, and teasing upcoming episodes that blend humor with historical analysis.

Noel reflects on the episode’s dark themes, stating, “We hope that you found this as darkly fascinating as we both did” (38:35), and emphasizes the importance of understanding the desperate measures people took for health in times of limited medical knowledge.

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Notable Quotes:

• Noel Brown: “This conversation today is twofold. It's about the power of belief, the placebo effect” (05:27)
• Ben Bowlin: “The question was not so much should we eat human flesh? But what sort of flesh is best to eat” (07:12)
• Michel de Montaigne (as referenced by Ben): “You cannot condemn people for practicing one kind of ritualized or spiritual cannibalism while you are happily grinding up mummies and drinking tinctures” (21:22)

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Ridiculous History offers a captivating glimpse into the bizarre medical practices of the past, illustrating how desperation and belief shaped early medicinal approaches. This episode not only sheds light on the lengths to which people went for health but also prompts reflection on the ethical boundaries of medical innovation.

Transcript

[Ben]

Oh, we're doing some. We're doing some cool stuff with our classic episode this week, Noel. We're exploring mummies.

[Noel]

We are indeed not mummies and daddies. No mummies. The embalmed kind. The kind that potentially rise from the dead and spook people out on Halloween. It's also a fun lo fi costume. Just involves some toilet paper, right?

[Ben]

Yeah. This is the story of a city called Guanajato. And back in the day, they instituted a grave tax, which just feels terrible. Like, that's so petty and penny pinching. You're going to tax people on the way out as well. If you couldn't pay the grave tax, you would run into some harsh penalties. 3. If you fall three years behind on your loved one's resting place, they will dig the body up and they will take it out of the grave.

[Noel]

Yeah. And these bodies were not, of course not ancient Egypt. They weren't like wrapped in linens and mummified in that classic fashion. They were someh found to have been naturally mummified. And word spread and it became something of a sideshow attraction, which is pretty gross. Gravediggers are trying to make a quick buck charging folks to take a peek at these naturally mummified remains. So why don't we jump into the story and hear all about the mummies of Guanajato? This is an I heart podcast.

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[Ben]

Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio.

[Noel]

Foreign.

[Ben]

Welcome to the show Ridiculous Historians. Our Halloween streak continues. We want to start today's episode by saying that this might not be your favorite show to listen to while you're eating. You think that's fair, Noel?

[Noel]

I mean, I say do what you want. You know, I find this to be strangely appetizing. I don't know why. I'm a fan of trying new things. Have you ever eaten human meat?

[Ben]

Not knowingly. But there are some interesting things we will discover about cannibalism along the way today. My name is Ben. Let's hear a shout out for our guest, super producer returning guest super producer Paul Decent. Wow, that's great.

[Noel]

That was a delayed reaction. So, Paul, have you ever eaten human meat? Paul is shaking his head vehemently.

[Ben]

Well, this is interesting, too, because does it count as autocannibalism if you ever chewed your fingernails?

[Noel]

Oh, come now, that seems like a semantic rabbit hole there.

[Ben]

It is a bit of one. But we are, I don't know, we've both eaten some pretty weird, interesting, unique things. But you have never knowingly consumed man flesh.

[Noel]

No, no, no, I have not.

[Ben]

But as we learn for hundreds of years, it was not just a thing that people occasionally did. It was considered something healthy, right?

[Noel]

It was. And I think this conversation today is twofold. It's about the power of belief, the placebo effect. You know, I was having a really interesting conversation with my dear friend Frank yesterday about how so many things boil down to the placebo effect. If we can convince ourselves that something is efficacious, whether spiritually, whether mentally, you know, mentally, psychologically, then it's a way of kind of like actively tricking your mind into making you feel a certain way. And so many of these things we're going to talk about today were like blood. If you drink the blood of a healthy person, it will make your blood better.

[Ben]

Right? This kind of sympathetic magic almost, or this magical thinking. The thing that's fascinating about the placebo effect is it does have measurable, quantifiable results. People can physically improve certain medical conditions based on the power of belief alone. And at the time when this was in vogue, in the period that we.

[Noel]

Will be discussing today, 16th and 17th centuries, when it kind of peaked. Right?

[Ben]

Yeah, that's when it peaked in Europe. At least back then, they didn't understand the placebo effect. You only measured things by their perceived results. And I believe this practice of consuming human flesh and blood for medicinal purposes really peaked in Germany, England, Italy and France right toward the end of the Renaissance.

[Noel]

That's right. And some of the information that we're talking about today come from a fascinating book by a guy named Dr. Richard Sugg, who teaches over at England's University of Durham. And he wrote a book called Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires. The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians. And this stuff was not just for the. Well to do, you know, the, the elite. It was something that trickled down, sometimes quite literally in the form of spurting gushes of blood coming from the necks of execution victims in the square to the lower class who believed in this stuff just as much and would go to great pains to get access to whatever they could. Of course, the upper class had a lot more access to the freshest of the fresh, the best of the best, in terms of their, their parts that they were using to make some of these remedies.

[Ben]

And as Sugg mentions in an interview with the Smithsonian, the question was not so much should we eat human flesh? But it was more a question of what sort of flesh is best to eat? What sort of human flesh is best to eat. And at first, Egyptian mummies were tremendously popular.

[Noel]

Yeah, because they, I mean, I don't know, it seems like that would be a lot to go through to get yourself get your hands on a legit Egyptian mummy over in Europe.

[Ben]

I don't know, there were quite a few. There was a mummy glut for some time.

[Noel]

Yeah, that's right. Mummies were a big part of this trend. Here's the thing, they would do things like grind up human skulls and then distill them down into alcohol to make something that later became popularized by King Charles II of England in the form of a tincture that he referred to as the King's Drops, which again was human skull powdered and dissolved in alcohol. And it supposedly cured everything from epilepsy to various seizures, headaches, whatever you got. The King's Drops can cure what ails you. And that's where things get interesting here, because I don't think there's obviously no scientific data that we have to measure how effective this stuff would have been. It was that power of belief, it seems like to me.

[Ben]

Right. This is panacea. Anytime that a medicine is proclaimed to be essentially a cure all, it may have some sort of beneficial effect on certain conditions, but it's almost completely unlikely that it would treat all of the conditions listed, they also, in addition to the King's drops, they used human fat. Human fat was an external treatment. German doctors wanted to soak bandages in human fat or rub fat onto the skin as a remedy for gout. This kind of stuff may sound sort of gruesome and scary to us now, but back then, this was seen as something that was the. Well, feels unfair to say it, but the bleeding edge of science. You know, these were scientists and doctors and priests who were recommending this treatment and taking it themselves.

[Noel]

Oh, totally. And it's like, you know, it's really easy to write this off as some sort of dark ages, kind of like bloodletting or leeching or whatever. But, you know, this had the backing of at least the. Some of the greatest minds of the time, one of which was a German doctor, a German Swiss doctor from the 16th century named Paracelsus. And he was all about drinking blood and thought that it could, you know, help keep you from aging. Some of these ideas that we have of vampirism even, right? Like the being forever young or whatever, or that it could, like we said, this notion of, like, cures, like, meaning that if you have a blood condition or, you know, you're anemic or something, that drinking someone else's blood, preferably of a young person, possibly a virgin. And a big thing they really liked was people that were killed under violent circumstances, because supposedly that made it more potent in some way, Right.

[Ben]

The blood was more vital. And not only. Not only was the blood more vital if someone was killed under violent circumstances, but it was more vital if it was given to you directly from the executioners. Who were these social outcasts thought to have profound magical abilities. Executioners were seeing. They were still social lepers, but they were seen as great healers, too. And we should mention that this kind of practice, while it had a heyday in Western Europe toward the end of the Renaissance, this belief in, like, cures like cannibalism as medicine dates way back into antiquity. In ancient Rome, people who suffered from epilepsy drank the blood of slain gladiators.

[Noel]

Yeah. Or even, like, ate their livers. I believe that's true. I mean, you know, that's about as fresh as it gets. But, yeah, it's true, Ben. It was a very popular practice that as soon as the event was over, epileptics would run down and try to drink the blood directly from the body, something they would refer to as the living blood. And there was even a Roman doctor named Scribonius Largus, who tried to justify some of these things through all kinds of pseudoscientific suggestions and indicated that if you ate the liver of a stag that was killed by a weapon that was used to kill a gladiator, then that also would be imbued with the magical powers of the fallen gladiator. What's the word? The vitality Kind of right.

[Ben]

And don't worry, this wasn't all just running up and trying to immediately get fresh blood from a corpse before it coagulated. There were also recipes where you would cook, stuff and prepare it. And in mummies, cannibals and vampires, you can find some depictions of these recipes. So the first step was to take blood from persons of warm, moist temperament, such as those of a blotchy red complexion and rather plump of build. And then you would let it dry or coagulate into a sticky mass. And then you would place it on a flat, smooth table of soft wood, cut into thin little slices, let the watery parts drip away, then put it on a stove. On the same table, stir it into a batter, wait until it's absolutely dry, put it on a warm bronze mortar, pound it through a sieve of finest silk, and when it has all been sieved, seal it in a glass jar. Renew it in the spring of every year. So this was also associated with the passage of seasons. You know, sort of the sort of the macro version of individual life, death and rebirth.

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[Dexter Thomas]

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[Unknown]

So what happened to Chappaquiddick? Well, it really depends on who you talk to.

There are many versions of what happened in 1969 when a young Ted Kennedy drove a into a pond and left.

[Paul Decent]

A woman behind to drown.

[Unknown]

There's a famous headline, I think, in the New York Daily News. It's teddy escapes, blonde drowns. And in a strange way, right, that sort of tells you the story really became about Ted's political future, Ted's political hopes. Will Ted become president?

Kappaquiddick is a story of a tragic death and how the Kennedy machine took control.

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[Noel]

I've got a favorite quote from a an article in Atlas Obscura about this subject called European Corpse Medicine promised better through cannibalism. And this comes from a tome called the Pharmacopoeia Medico Chemica. Chemica, I believe. Chemica. And this was by a German doctor named Johann Schroeder. And this was written in the 17th century. And this is kind of the end all be. All this sort of sums up sort of like what the creme de la creme of the specimen that you might be after to get you some of these sweet, sweet human meat bits. Quote, take the fresh unspotted cadaver of a red headed man, because in them the blood is thinner and the flesh hence more Excellent. Aged about 24. The body, the guy, a person 24 years old who has been executed and died a violent death. Let the corpse lie one day and night in the sun and moon, but the weather must be good. Cut the flesh in pieces and sprinkle it with myrrh and just a little aloe. Then soak it in spirits of wine for several days, hang it up for 6 or 10 hours, soak it again in spirits of wine, then let the pieces dry in dry air, in a shady spot, no less. Thus they will be similar to smoked meat and will not stink.

[Ben]

Yeah, stink is important. And you don't want too much aloe. Like, that's just basic cannibalism 101 right there. You know what I mean? Nothing ruins an otherwise fantastic cadaver more than too much aloe. You have to be moderate with that. And as we said, this was, again, this was not a bad thing. These people who were being consumed, although they were almost certainly being consumed without their consent, in most cases they were not being punished. European practitioners of this believed that they were acquiring vitality, but they didn't think they were, you know, stealing the souls of their enemies or something aggressive of that nature. There's a very interesting point they bring up in Lapham's Quarterly Roundtable, A Brief History of Medical Cannibalism by Bess Lovejoy, which is that while people in Europe were consuming blood or livers or human flesh or using human fat as a poultice for wounds, they were also tremendously discriminatory against a couple of other kinds Of. Of cannibalism. One would be the alleged practices of indigenous Americans, which were wildly exaggerated, spun out into these racist tall tales of sworn monstrous man eating people living on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. And then the second one was discrimination.

[Noel]

Against Catholics because of transubstantiation. Right, right.

[Ben]

The belief that the wafer of wine one consumes at communion does in fact become the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ. So they said these people are cannibals while they are rubbing human body fat on their gout areas. Yeah. On their boo boos. And this seems, again, this seems strange. It seems like some double think.

[Noel]

Did you see the quote from that anthropologist who kind of just referred to this as being very hypocritical? And I was trying to find it. You may have it in front of you right now. And it was a good one.

[Ben]

Well, there were people who were against this or at least noticed the hypocrisy very early on. There was a French writer named Michel de Montaigne. Sorry, Casey, I hope we're doing you proud here. Who in 1580 attacked the hypocrisy of Europeans who condemned these practices. And he said, you know, essentially, you cannot condemn people for practicing one kind of ritualized or spiritual cannibalism while you are happily grinding up mummies and drinking tinctures and skulls and having the king's drops. And then other people, like in 1566, even earlier than that, the herbalist Leonhard Fuchs.

[Noel]

That's a tough one.

[Ben]

Had attacked this quote, gory matter of cadavers sold for medicine, wondering who, unless he approves of cannibalism, would not loathe this remedy.

[Noel]

Here's the one I was talking about. And that's all fascinating and completely on point. This is interesting, though. This cultural and medical anthropologist from Vanderbilt named Beth Conklin, in the Smithsonian article, talks about the distinction between non Western cannibalism of, like, indigenous tribal, the notion of ritual cannibalism and the kind that we're talking about in the former, there is such a huge relationship between the eater and the et. You know, as though you are specifically soaking up their spirit in some way or like capturing some spiritual essence or.

[Ben]

Communion with your ancestors or communing with your ancestors.

[Noel]

Right. And in what we're talking about, that was gone. That was like, totally irrelevant. It's much more about the notion of that, like, cures, like, mentality of like, I'm gonna drink your blood. It's gonna fix my blood. You know, it's. It's a lot Less spiritual. It's much more pseudo scientific really, you know.

[Ben]

Right, right. Cause it was seen as technology rather than an article of faith.

[Noel]

And that is not to say that we don't do things today like get blood transfusions or liver transfus could equate to absorbing someone else's fluids or viscera. You know, it's obviously not the same as just like you know, munching it down.

[Ben]

Right. Also, since we are in one of the spookiest seasons of the year, I do feel it is appropriate for us to mention that despite the scientific pursuit that was occurring in Europe, there was also a history of using human body parts for magical purposes. Like a thieves candle or a hand of glory.

[Noel]

Thieves candle being a candle made out of human fat. Right. For the tallows, I guess.

[Ben]

Yeah. And up until up into the 1880s, these thieves candles were used to stupefy or paralyze a person. I myself could see it working because if someone lit a human fat candle in front of me, I would be shocked, at least for a short time. I would be very surprised if anyone did that. And Noel, I have a. Oh man, I've been waiting. I don't know if now is the time, but do you want to learn about something related to this but equally strange? Yeah, it's a little bit sweeter. Have you ever heard of the mellified man?

[Noel]

No. Sounds tasty.

[Ben]

It's a human mummy confection. So this was a legendary medicinal substance created by steeping a willing human corpse in honey. It dates back to the 1500s. So even kind of around the same time period, a Chinese medical doctor named Li Shizhen was reporting that in Arabia, in the modern day Middle east, some elderly men nearing the end of their lives would mummify themselves in honey. And this process, mellification, would start before they died. So the men were 70 or 80 years old. And when they made this decision to become a mellified person, they took no more food or drink, only bathing and eating a little honey till a month after his excreta are nothing but honey. And then he dies. They put the body in a stone coffin, likewise full of honey, with an inscription giving the year and month of burial. After a hundred years, the seals are removed and the confection is used to treat wounds and fractures and broken limbs. And you only have to do it kind of like the king's drops. You only consume a few drops orally. And the doctor says he doesn't know whether or not this is a true tale. But for hundreds of years afterwards, the same sort of people who are like, you know, what's going to cure my epilepsy? Mummy dust. We're like, we need to find one of these honey corpses. And now, even now, people are still debating whether or not this actually happens.

[Noel]

And the thing too, that I've gotten from several sources, just the perspective on this is that it was almost treated. It wasn't really magical thinking exactly in this period because it was backed by that. This renaissance kind of ideal of, like, progress and like, you know, medical innovation. But it was almost like almost kind of like a holistic type thing. Right. Where it almost was the way you would be. You know, there were a lot of these herbs and different kind of holistic remedies mixed in. Like, for example, even that little quote that I read earlier about what kind of body to prepare and, like, how to slice it up and make, you know, human jerky out of it. It talked about soaking in an aloe. An aloe is known to have some kind of holistic benefits as far as, like, calming the stomach or different things like that. And in a lot of these recipes, you see it mixed with things like myrrh and peony and like, all of these kind of things that you might see in a little bit more of a holistic remedy type. An herbalist kind of book. Right. So I don't know, it's interesting. There's sort of like a combination there. I wonder if it was less the. The human meat and more the, you know, tummy calming herbs.

[Ben]

Right. And there's. There's another book we should shout out here. Louise. No. The author of Medicinal Cannibalism in Early Modern English Literature and Culture has also pursued similar research to the book we mentioned earlier. Mummies, cannibals and vampires. And what they keep confirming is that while there were some opponents, there were very, very few opponents. Far fewer than you might think. Most people at this time in Europe were generally on board with this. Did not think it was a. Did not think it was an ethical quandary. Didn't think it was immoral.

[Noel]

Well, we've talked about resurrection men before, the idea of digging up bodies in order to perform autopsies. Because that was very in vogue around this time, too. The Science of Breaking down the Human bod and Figuring out what makes it tick. But that was definitely happening as well to get some of these specimens, right?

[Ben]

Yeah, absolutely. And I. I want to go on record here saying I think it's time we resurrect resurrection men. At least the phrase it's just Too cool to let it die.

[Noel]

It should be like a superhero crew.

[Ben]

Yeah. Yeah. I'm surprised it's not already a wrestling team or something. I don't know. Let us know what you think. What kind of group would be called Resurrection men today in 2018?

[Noel]

That is a good question, Ben. And I'd like to know. There were some other even more messed up places that these bodies were acquired. One in particular was from Ireland because the Irish were in Europe pretty severely looked down upon and they, you know, the highfalutin European aristocracy probably didn't think much of importing some Irish cadavers in particular. There was one remedy that I think is fascinating. It was a type of moss that would grow on a skull.

[Ben]

Yeah.

[Noel]

And that was a very popular one as well. And it was specifically indigenous to Ireland. Yeah, the moss.

[Ben]

Their skulls were plucked from battlefields.

[Noel]

Battlefields and mass graves. And. And you know, even, of course, the people that are going to get the brunt of this are going to be the poor that are in unmarked graves or in like, more like mass graves. But I don't think it was beneath some of these folks that were trying to make a buck to maybe even do a little digging up of marked graves.

[Ben]

Right.

[Noel]

Proper cemeteries.

[Ben]

And Sug makes a great note about this because he explains how the Irish were seen as, as you said, Noel, deeply inferior on some level. And according to him, according to the author, corpse medicines were often derived from bodies alienated in various ways from ordinary humanity. Distant most of all from you, whether you are a merchant, a thief, an apothecary, physician, or a patient. And this is an incredibly important point because we're othering things. These people thought it would be completely uncivil to eat the skull of someone they knew from town. You know what I mean? Your fellow neighbor's skull shouldn't be in your king's drops. It had to be something exotic, something different, something a little bit less human in the mind of the person taking this sort of treatment.

[Paul Decent]

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[Dexter Thomas]

Are there any pictures of you online? I'm not just talking about Google. I'm talking anywhere.

[Paul Holes]

Clearview scrapes together images from Facebook, from LinkedIn, from Venmo accounts.

[Dexter Thomas]

That database is now being used by police departments all across the country to match criminal suspect photos. And sometimes it makes mistakes.

[Paul Holes]

So in this one case, two of their search results that are. I think we're in the top 10 of the search results were Michael Jordan, just a picture of Michael Jordan, but.

[Dexter Thomas]

Cops are still using it to make arrests.

[Paul Holes]

Police, they are trusting this software to lead them to the right suspect. But you're not even being told that it was used, let alone given any of the details about how it works.

[Dexter Thomas]

This is not Minority Report. This is happening right now. People are getting arrested and doing actual time in jail after being picked out by a computer. I'm Dexter Thomas, host a Kill Switch where every Wednesday we explain the right now of living in the future. You can turn off the computer, but do not let the computer turn you off. Listen to Kill switch in the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Paul Holes]

A murder happens, the case goes cold. Then over a hundred years later, we take a second look. I'm Paul Holes, a retired cold case investigator.

[Kate Winkler Dawson]

And I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a journalist and historian.

[Paul Holes]

On our podcast Buried Bones, we re examined historical true crime cases using modern forensic techniques.

[Kate Winkler Dawson]

We dig into what the original investigators may have missed. Growing up on a farm, when I heard a gunshot, I did not immediately think murder.

[Paul Holes]

Unless this person went out to shoot squirrels, they're not choosing a 22 to go hunting out there.

[Kate Winkler Dawson]

These cases may be old, but the questions are still relevant and often chilling.

[Paul Holes]

I know this chauffeur is not of concern. You know, it's like, well, he's the last one who saw our life, so how did they eliminate him?

[Kate Winkler Dawson]

Join us as we take you back to the cold cases that haunt us to this day.

[Paul Holes]

New episodes every Wednesday on the exactly right network. Listen to Buried bones on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Unknown]

So what happened to Chappaquiddick? Well, it really depends on who you talk to.

There are many versions of what happened in 1969 when a young Ted Kennedy drove a car into a pond and.

[Paul Decent]

Left a woman behind to drown.

[Unknown]

There's a famous headline, I think, in the New York Daily News. It's teddy Escapes, Blonde Drowns. And in a strange way, Right, that sort of tells you the story really became about Ted's political future, Ted's political hopes. Will Ted become president?

Kappaquiddick is a story of a tragic death and how the Kennedy machine took control.

[Paul Decent]

And he's not the only Kennedy to survive a scandal.

[Unknown]

The Kennedys have lived through disgrace, affairs, violence, you name it. So is there a curse? Every week we go behind the headlines and beyond the drama of America's royal family.

[Paul Decent]

Listen to United States of Kennedy on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever.

[Unknown]

You get your podcasts.

[Ben]

And I guess one of the questions people have is going to be, well, what happened next? How did this fall out of Vogue?

[Noel]

Yeah, I don't know. There was evidence of it happening as recently as, like, the 1800s, right?

[Ben]

Yes.

[Noel]

So it didn't just fall right out of Vogue.

[Ben]

No. Maybe people just stopped being as open about it. And for the fans of the X Files and such in the crowd, it evokes this image, perhaps, of people secretly feeding on blood or human flesh to extend their own lifespans or treat various medical conditions. And, boy, do we have a story for you on a different show. We talked about this in an episode on Modern Vampires here in the US as we record this episode, there are two different companies that, for a significant amount of money, will transfer the blood or the plasma, specifically, of a young person into the body of an older person in the hopes of extending their lifespan and the quality of their life. Do you remember that one?

[Noel]

Yeah. Man, it makes me think of that Radiohead song on Hail to the Thief. We suck young blood.

[Ben]

Yes. Yeah, just.

[Noel]

That's a creepy one. But, yeah, that's always what I think of. It's intense. And you think of it as being this thing that, like, only the elite, you know, mega evil, like the elitist of the elite, most evil, megalomaniacal humans would ever consider doing. But then when you see the way it happened throughout history, you know, drinking blood from the neck of the body on the chopping block, they literally would pay a couple bucks or whatever to the executioner to get a little cup of the blood. You know, it's warm and fresh. You start to realize that, like, no, this is not exclusively in the realms of the elite.

[Ben]

Yeah. And it's not exclusively confined to the past. In fact, in recent years there's been a cannibalism crisis in certain African countries wherein people who have. People who are albinos, who have albinism, right where their skin is very, very light, are being hunted because their body parts are used in magical rituals. So this continues, but this is a little different because it's not seen as a science. Again, the folks who were doing this during the Renaissance period that we're talking about, we can't emphasize this enough, but we will try. They did not think they were doing anything bad. They did not think they were villains. They thought they were early adopters or people who were illuminated to ancient medicinal lore.

[Noel]

Interesting.

[Ben]

You have to wonder what was it like back then, especially when so many, so many conditions were fatal or a death sentence. You can't blame people for looking for hope wherever they can find it.

[Noel]

Dude, I saw an amazing image the other day of some Egyptian dental work and it was like holes were drilled in the center of the teeth and they were like, you know, strung together with bits of like gold wire or copper or whatever. Really, really painful looking. But I guess a better alternative than, I don't know, seems like you can just let the teeth fall out.

[Ben]

I think I've seen similar photos as and it made me feel like my mouth hurt just looking at it. You know what I mean? I experienced vicarious pain. And we have to ask, while it's easy for us to distance ourselves from this today, what would you do if consuming some sort of tincture or potion or wearing some sort of poultice of human flesh could help treat a wound faster or more efficiently than modern medical techniques? Would you do it? Would you want to know the provenance of the, I guess the human medicine that you were consuming or would you rather it be anonymous? I don't know because people do a lot of stuff to stay alive, you know what I mean?

[Noel]

Yeah, they really do. They do to this day. And I think the placebo effect largely is still in play despite doctors sort of quickness to prescribe something that will cure a particular, you know, illness. I think a lot of times people get more psychologically dependent on stuff, especially in the realm of like mental health, you know, the idea of antidepressants and anxiety medications. I think it's. It's easy to discount how powerful the mind is in these situations to just think that a medicine can just flip a switch and like make you better. But there's still that psychological component that I think is just as important as it was when people were, you know, eating corpse juice, corpse dust, corpse paste.

[Ben]

Absolutely. Oh, corpse pills. There's probably something like that still around. And we don't want to end on a down note. We hope that you found this as darkly fascinating as we both did. But let's end on something a little more conversational and fun and less grim. Noel, what do you say to some listener mail?

[Noel]

I love it.

[Ben]

Noel, this is. This is a short one. And it's someone pinging us on something that we. Dinging, pinging, pinging, pinging with a P. Okay.

[Noel]

It's giving us a little poke, like potential.

[Ben]

Yeah.

[Noel]

Or poke.

[Ben]

Ryan M. He wrote in and said. Dear Ben, Noel and Casey, I think it would be monumentously ridiculous and possibly quite educational to feature an entire episode exclusively in Richard Nixon impersonations. I just listened to your episode Nixon and Louis Armstrong, and I would like to challenge you to do the aforementioned Nixon episode. So long as it has nothing to do with Nixon. Thanks, guys. Keep it ridiculous.

[Noel]

That is just a tall order, man. You know, I was. I was on board with that when we threw it out there as kind of a joke. But we have gotten a lot of feedback that people would like to hear us do a Nick all Nixon episode. But I don't think I'd be able to keep character.

[Ben]

I think we can do. This is my pitch. And let me know what you think. Think ridiculous historians. I think we could do a segment. How about that? Like 10, 15 minutes. I think we could do that.

[Noel]

We could it be a recurring segment.

[Ben]

It could be a recurring segment. It could even be. Okay. This is why we love doing this show with each other. Because now we are actively brainstorming live. It could just be different impersonations.

[Noel]

That's true. Or it could be. Nixon's commenting on the news.

[Ben]

Nixon's on the news.

[Noel]

Nixon on the news. Nixon's on the news.

[Ben]

Nixon's on the news.

[Noel]

Yeah. Cause all of our segments have to have. Have alliteration in it. There's Casey on the case. Nixon's on the news. We're kind of a one trick.

[Ben]

We gotta work with Fact Genie. We're still workshopping.

[Noel]

Well, we. That's that. We've kind of killed that segment.

[Ben]

We. I think we did we do it more than once.

[Noel]

I think we maybe did it twice. I think we should. I think we should go back to the drawing board on that. That whole concept.

[Ben]

So the vision board, you mean. So what? Do you have a listener mail?

[Noel]

Yeah, I do.

[Ben]

Caught your interest.

[Noel]

A shorty. The subject is Spam. But it is not spam. But it's about spam. And it comes from Benjamin S. And it says, I was listening to your spam episode when I heard you say that Russian food is gross. All that you have to do is try chebouriak or chebourke. I'm not quite sure how to pronounce it. C H E B U R E K I. I've heard it a couple different ways, but he says this opinion will disappear. Just look it up. If you want to make it yourself, I would recommend the YouTube channel, Life of Boris. Anyway, you guys have a great show and I'm always excited for the next episode. Well, thank you, Benjamin. And I did look it up and it looks delicious. It looks great. Great.

[Ben]

It's almost like an empanada.

[Noel]

Almost like a combination of like. Exactly, Ben. It's like a hand pie, meat pie kind of thing. Let's see what some of the filling options are.

[Ben]

Oh, ground or minced meat, but they also have onions added in there. It's a national dish of the Tatar people.

[Noel]

Interesting.

[Ben]

Yeah, I think it's beef or lamb.

[Noel]

Oh, I love lamb. I would go for lamb, but yeah, that does look fantastic. And I'd never heard of that one before, but it is very similar to like an empanada or almost like, like a pierogi or something. Or like a pasty. You ever had a pasty?

[Ben]

Yes. Yes.

[Noel]

Is that a Pennsylvania thing? Certainly in that part of the country, right?

[Ben]

Yeah, probably. I mean, look, I'm always down for turnover. Meat pie kind of situation. That's just who I am. I've accepted it. I lean into it. Thank you, Benjamin. And thank you, Ryan, for writing to us. This concludes our listener mail, but not our show. Tune in for our next episode where we explore the fact and fiction behind what may well be history's first serial killer. Oh, we should also make an announcement, Noel, since we're gonna be on the road.

[Noel]

Yeah. With our other show stuff they don't want you to know.

[Ben]

Yeah.

[Noel]

We are gonna. You're gonna have one sad, sad week where you only get one episode out.

[Ben]

Of us, but it's gonna be a very special episode. We don't want to spoil it, but you may just bust a gut laughing.

[Noel]

Oh, yeah, Ben, that was very coy of you. Yeah. Because typically, you know, we were more of a groan inducing show than a laugh inducing show. And this episode, my friends, is gonna flip that on its head. That paradigm is going to shift.

[Ben]

Oh, boy, I hope we're not making too, too many promises, but I feel confident, Noel. I feel confident in this.

[Noel]

I do, too. Yeah, we might even do some heroin live on the show. That's another clue. I'm joking. We're not gonna do heroin. But it's a clue about what the episode might be about. Bust a gut laughing, comedy and heroin.

[Ben]

Just put the, you know, put the pieces together. Build yourself a conspiracy wall. Sort of like Charlie Day in that episode of Always Sunny in Philadelphia. And in the meantime, contact your fellow ridiculous historians and take a guess as to what this episode might be. It's gonna be tough to guess. I will personally be surprised and impressed if anybody guesses it in advance. But you can. And cooperate with your fellow listeners on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, especially our community page, Ridiculous Historians.

[Noel]

If you don't want to do any of that stuff, you can write us an [e-mail], take a cue from your fellow listeners and we'll read those things on the show. Oh, and lest we forget, thanks to super producer, guest super producer. He's just a run of the mill, excellent producer.

[Ben]

Oh, yeah, and a great guy, too.

[Noel]

Great guy. Paul Decken, ladies and gentlemen. He doesn't have a voice, though. He is, in fact, mute. But he is really good at hand gestures and head shakes.

[Ben]

And Paul. Paul is NBC mute by choice.

[Noel]

Mute by choice, exactly.

[Ben]

We'd also like to thank Alex Williams, who composed our track. And of course, we'd like to thank our research associates, Christopher Haciotes and Eve's Jeff Coat. And as we often do when we close the show, Noel, I'd like to thank you. This was a Illuminati.

[Noel]

It was something. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

[Dexter Thomas]

Are there any pictures of you online? Then you could already be in a massive police database without even knowing it.

[Paul Holes]

Clearview scrapes together images From Facebook, from LinkedIn, from Venmo account counts.

[Dexter Thomas]

I'm Dexter Thomas, host of Kill Switch, a podcast about how living in the future is affecting us right now.

[Paul Holes]

Police, they are trusting this software with this magical ability to lead them to the right suspect.

[Dexter Thomas]

In this episode, we dive into how cops are using AI and facial recognition and sometimes getting it wrong and putting innocent people behind bars.

[Paul Holes]

So if your accuser is this algorithm, but you're not even being told that it was used, let alone given any of the details about how it works.

[Dexter Thomas]

Listen to Kill Switch on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get.

[Kate Winkler Dawson]

Your podcasts Hear insightful, entertaining discussions on today's important health and wellness topics on the Health discovered podcast from WebMD. Through in depth conversations with experts, Health Discovered covers everything from tips for healthier living to the latest on therapy and mental health.

[Paul Decent]

My goal is to really destigmatize mental health treatment and looking at it from a whole health perspective, physical health and mental health can be intertwined.

[Kate Winkler Dawson]

Listen to WebMD Health discovered on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Noel]

This is an iHeart podcast.